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Are Sysadmins Really that Bad?
tgbrittai asks: "According to Paul Boutin they are merely an obstacle to be manipulated or outmaneuvered. According to Steve Wozniak they are pimps. I've known my share of good and bad sysadmins, programmers and every other professional role out there, and I have to wonder: are sysadmins really THAT bad?"
Most times sys-admins are overworked and underpaid and have to deal with users who take advantage of their local IT person, tasking them to fix systems that they callously break. Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell". How would you rate your sys-admin and what things did you have to do to make things run smoothly (or not)?
....when he suggests "Treat everything he does as a favor. ". Actually, that's not a bad life strategy - when the waitress refills your coffee right away, treat it as if she didn't really have to - because, really, she didn't! She could have just ignored your empty cup, or waited a few minutes, or whatever.
Same with a sysadmin. When he adds a rewrite rule (done!) 20 seconds after you ask for it, act appreciative and say thanks, even though that's his job. Because he could have put it off until tomorrow and probably would have reasonable excuses for doing so. (Incidentally, I hosed up this rewrite rule the first time by leaving off the trailing $. Doh!)
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I dont disagree with your statement here, necessarily, but it does sound to me like an issue of pointing out a problem, without really offering any notions for improvement. You say that new sysadmins are too "inexperienced" and dont necessarily know enough about Legacy systems. Well... how would they? I mean, if you've worked on any mainframe systems, you'll know that knowing one set of commands doesnt do you ANY good on the very next mainframe you might be forced to work on. And how exactly does one become an "experienced" sysadmin? Go to sysadmin school? Really? Sign me up!
It seems to me that things are the way they are because... well, they have to be. When an old sysadmin leaves, you're not going to be able to replace him with someone who knows everything about your current infrastructure, and happens to have niche knowledge of all of your various legacy machines. If such a person exist, chances are very high that they're currently still employed somewhere else, or are about to retire. Employees dont stay in circulation forever. Eventually mass amounts of experience starts falling out of the market, and has to be replaced with "noobs".
Im not saying huge companies should necessarily be hiring inexperienced sysadmins. But someone has to, or inexperienced sysadmins can NEVER become experienced sysadmins. Im fortunate, in that I was hired on as a sysadmin at a University, during a complete infrastructure rebuild. So while Ive been forced to learn a passing familiarity with the mainframe systems, it's mostly been to help usher them out entirely. And Ive been, for the most part, at liberty to build the new infrastructure around her to my own personal standards and benefits, meaning Ive got a pretty good grip on things. Gradually, I run into problems that I cant solve with a simple script, so Ive been forced to learn things like sed and awk, as you mentioned, more and more over time. And even those, btw, arent a universal solution, especially if old IBM-era mainframes are involved.
Even if what you're saying is the problem, if sysadmins with "not enough" experience for a particular job are being thrown into them... there's no real solution for that. I mean, if you draw up a requirement for all of the systems you want a sysadmin to know, chances are NOT good that you're going to find someone who A. Meets all the requirements, including experience with all of your legacy systems at your company B. Lives nearby or is willing to relocate to where you are and C. Is looking for a salary exactly where you're offering it.
Pay no attention to the systems administrator part of my job title...it's just a standard honorific. >_>
Before I launch into this, it really seems like they define good and bad by their customer service skills, so that's what I'm addressing by "good" and "bad", not so much their technical knowledge.
In my experience, the problems with sysadmins tends to be that with the ones that lack the ability to understand the user. This is what people refer to as the "IT mindset" where the user is the enemy and is doing whatever they can to make IT's life more difficult. In some cases, this is very true. There ARE abusive users out there. However, most people simply want to do their job, and their job is NOT getting these machines to work right. Getting back to the "understanding the user" thing, I find a great many sysadmins have no empathy for how a user feels when their machine has gone down, and why would they? When has a sysadmin ever really felt the panic and/or frustration of having a machine crash and not having the first clue of how to fix it? We KNOW what we should do, and while we'll be annoyed at the extra work, we're (hopefully) never flailing around blindly...or if we are we're careful never to show signs of it. A user's machine goes down and they have no idea what to do. They panic, they worry, they don't think logically...they immediately run to the nearest person who they think can help them and oftentimes get the look of "Why should I?" or "Can't you see I'm busy right now?"
Again, that doesn't mean there aren't people who don't actively try to bypass what they SHOULD be doing to get the problem they caused looked at immediately because they think they're more important. However, I think the sysadmins that most people complain about are the ones who let the handful of lazy/abusive users jade their dealings with the ones who simply want to do their job and go home.
However, I find that the "bad" sysadmins are about as common as the truly abusive users. They stand out in your memory so it seems like there's a lot of them, but they're actually far from the rule. YMMV, of course. After all, in the course of a day three or four people might stop to hold open a door for you, but the one you remember at the end of the day is the idiot that cut you off on the highway. Human memory is a funny thing...