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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)?
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-
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.