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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)?
I currently work as a Network Admin for a large retail company. I started with this company as a store clerk, then moved to the helpdesk, while i was in college. This helped me learn patience and how to be polite with everyone no matter how annoying, wrong, irate the "customer"/"employee" is. I look at some coworkers who have no clue how to handle talking to a customer or a user needing help and give them lip every chance they get. I understand the frustrations of having petty work assigned to you by a VP level person that interrupts your day and workflow. All the time i have important time constrained projects interrupted by those "important" people who have to have some blackberry/treo/etc problem fixed asap. I have to drop whatever important task I am on and concentrate soley on the happiness of this one person. Ultimately thats what it comes down to i have found. Although i get my work done and i am thorough on all mky projects, I am not known for that, I am known for always being the nice guy who helps out the Execs and their exec assistants, and honestly that puts me in better light than anything else. Sometimes the interruptions are extremely frustrating, but when the execs are happy, everyone is happy.
Its not that there bad people. Most of them are pretty nice if you talk to them over lunch. The problem is they are so constrained by what they can do that they are very frustrating to work with. I must say they also hate working with me for the most part.
The problem is that I'm somewhat tech savy. The sys admin don't like anybody trying new things. Their management likes it even less. Do one little thing or install one little app and if you have problems your on your own. Doesn't matter if your laptop explodes, they'll blame it on VMWARE or whatever you happen to be running.
It wasn't always like this. In days of old the Sys Admin were local and reported into the same groups they supported. As such they knew what we were working on and would help out. Management would support this because it often lead to increased productivity or reliability. But at some point a bean counter decided we needed a corporate IT organization.
Once you decouple the support from the groups they support you end up with apathy and endless rules. Also to get the groups to try anything new you have to weave your way through a bureaucracy. You also end up with smaller and smaller IT groups because their contributions to the end product become harder and harder to trace. If a business unit needs to cut costs the first thing they look at is horizontal organizations outside their own structure. Its a lot easier to cut an outside IT guy than a developer working on a product.
Things look to be taking a turn for the worse. Some of our IT is now going to be out sourced. To me this is equivalent to saying I now fully support myself. I can just imagine trying to convince some contracted person in India that I really do need to have VMPlayer installed on my Windows laptop....
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
I strongly agree with everything you're saying. One of the 20 unofficial roles I have at a large bank is Unix System Administrator. I really only spend ~100 hours/year doing system administration, and that's only to deal with something breaking. We have enough work for a full time sysadmin, but we have management who aim to consistently do less than the minimum. I believe the fundamental problem of system administration in any business environment is that you never see the benefit of good results. You only see costs of failures and people running around putting out fires all of the time. A good system administrator tends to work himself out of a justification for a job because there's no compelling business reason to keep employing someone expensive whose benefits to the organization are invisible. Coming in on the weekend to replace hardware, fixing things that break before people notice they are down and recovering files for people who will never admit that they deleted something important are all common sysadmin tasks that are rarely acknowledged.
Micromanagement and imaginary, perceived cost savings create unsustainable environments. Here in a non-technology group of a large bank, we've got a handful of Sun servers attached to an EMC. There are numerous persistent memory errors on the Sun's that could be fixed with a service call and a small scheduled downtime. Well, in a normal environment that is all it takes. However, we don't currently have a maintenance contract. We did have a service contract years ago when the problems started, but maintaining systems is an anti-goal for management - apparently there is no profit in keeping things running. The EMC has been performing well, with the occaisional disk failure that is completely invisible thanks to RAID and automatic call home to get a replacement disk sent out. That's been our key saving grace since we don't backup anything(including production servers).
Unfortunately, this kind of short sighted, unprofessional approach to IT is common in business driven organizations. When everything comes crashing down, as it always will given sufficient time, someone will look at what happened and try to prevent it from happening again. This is the kind of sabatage through mismanagement that leads to the creation of company policies that make it hard for anyone to do their job. Our company has policies that require that system, network, security and database administrators all be separate people. The developers have to be separate as well and can't have access to production systems. There's some very good reasons for all of these policies, but business people can't resist the temptation of hiring one person to do all of these jobs. After all, who better to get things working and fix problems than a developer with root access to everything. It sure cuts down on time wasted in getting authorizations and having meetings.
The first IT job I took after getting out of the army was answering phones on a help desk for a retail company. We had to support about 1,500 users.
Not long before I started that job, the company had hired a new "Director of End User Technology" and this guy was sharp. His primary goal at the time was to straighten out the cobbled together mess of a network that had haphazardly grown department by department. The place was a real mess and the network ran like mud.
Over a period of about four years, we standardized our PCs and laptops, physically consolidated the servers that were spread all over the HQ building, corrected the messed up cabling, centralized administration, built a training room and implemented a number of classes, etc. It was a truly exciting and fun place to work and virtually everyone who I started out with on the help desk eventually learned, got certifications and moved into administration and/or engineering. When I had started there we had a real mom & pop shop type feel and very little oversight. All we had to go on were some clearly defined goals and a directive to "get things fixed."
We consistently accomplished our goals. Within the first couple years we had fixed the network and made it into something useful. The consequence was more use by upper management and as you might expect, more management from upper management. Every time we met another goal, the more visibility we received. The more visibility we received, the more layers of management they installed above us. Every layer of management installed made it harder and harder to actually get anything done, basically because each new layer of management knew less about IT but more about "managing.".
I guess mostly I'm just whining here, but eventually most of us who had built the network quit. They 'managed' us right out the door.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
But they lack the power to change it, and their bosses don't want to.
That brings to mind my first rule of systems administration: Give me the authority and the resources to prevent the problem and if it breaks anyway I'll work 20 hour days to fix it. Get in my way and stop me from preventing the problem and I'm headed home at 5:00 whether you're in a frothing panic or not.
Most places I've worked liked the display of initiative and steped back to let me do my thing. They liked the results too: 20 hour days were very very rare.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Yeah, I got my back all up and was ready to write a diatribe (I did RTFA first, however) and found out that this story is a simple case of a lack of reading comprehension. Every time something like this happens, it makes me sad. Especially on a geek news site, where probably a lot of the people have dabbled in programming - they'll be as careful as they need to be to get their code to validate, but when it comes to understanding a natural language, they won't even put in the effort. Then we end up with crap like this. Half the time I'm explaining something to someone, it seems like they just don't get it. (the other half of the time they're raising on-topic objections) :) Maybe I need to dial back my vocabulary for the average person, but I think there's something about logic missing there too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The solution is so painfully obvious that no one will ever implement it.
Business people need to look at more than one little line item on a budget. There are a lot of jobs that pay $50-80k for a sysadmin. The vast majority of day to day things can be done by one of these people. When they get stumped on legacy stuff or something really weird, they end up spending a lot of time spinning their wheels and have a hard time getting the problem solved.
The other option is to hire the $150k sysadmin who has tons of experience and makes the hard problems look easy. These are the kinds of people who you can give 3 months to solve a problem, or you can hire a team of 5 people to work for 20 years on the same problem. If you put it in that perspective, the money is well spent.
Smart business people look at numbers and know that $150k is more than $50k, and also know that if they yell loud enough about the $100k they saved, some of it will end up in their bonus.
The thing that seems obvious to me is that you hire a bunch of the cheaper people who can do all of the normal day to day stuff, and you also hire a guru who gets all of the impossible tasks. The less experienced guys learn from the guru and the guru doesn't spend 99% of his time doing tasks that would be better suited to a college student or a shell script.
Of course, companies don't like this idea because HR people don't want to believe that one person can be worth several times as much as another person who is referred to with the same type of job title. In HR there are no gurus, so the concept is completely foreign. After all, if someone was inclined to be a guru in any field, how would they end up in HR? =)
Very true.
I'm a sysadmin in a DoD Classified network on a USAF Base ( LOTS of red tape) and the first rule is security (which it should be). That pretty much means lock everything down. Some examples include: lock the USB ports, prevent writes to CD-RW Drives, prevent writes to DVD-RW Drives, audit everyhthing (PL2), prevent printer installs, software installs/removal, lock down screen savers (executable code), password changes every 62 days, approved software installs only which usually means we are lagged on releasees, etc, etc, etc. Some of these are silly, yes, but I don't make the rules. The "red tape" is mandated to us by the Air Force.
All this red tape creates a very unfriendly user environment where the users frequently are annoyed with the admins because they can't do something as simple as copy data from a classified PC to a classified laptop for a presentation. They have to track down an admin to do the copy for them. Paperwork must be filled out and whitnesses present. They may not have access to files due to security permissions. Won't delve into the requirements here but it has to do with employees from different companies all working the same program who potentially have access to each company's proprietary information. I can go on and on, but the bottom line is red tape creates a very unfriendly user environment where the users frequently claim the sysadmins "don't know what they are doing", which isn't the case at all. The users are deliberatly not allowed to do what they are trying to do. However a majority of the user community thinks us admins make the system painful to use on purpose. Not the case. and they frequently take out their frustrations on us.