Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day

An anonymous reader writes "Today is the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. It is always the last Friday in July and is the one day that SysAdmins are supposed to get the respect they deserve to be getting the other 364 days of the year. Today is the day that we wish everyone would considering the daunting tasks, small budgets, and ridiculous timelines that many SysAdmins face all year. Please thank them for everything they do for you and for your business. If you think you have a great SysAdmin today would be the day to nominate them for SysAdmin of the Year. 'The idea for System Administrator Day was inspired by a print ad for a Hewlett-Packard laser jet printer. The ad showed lines of employees bringing gifts for the IT guy who made the purchase. System Administrator Appreciation Day has, over the years, garnered support from many organizations."

Comments

Re:I Choose Not to Participate

[eneville]

rm -rf /usr/staff/eldavojohn
mkdir /usr/staff/eldavojohn
wget http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg > /usr/staff/eldavojohn/hello.jpg
chown eldavojohn hello.jpg

"Hello, Human Resources? There's something about one of your employees that you need to know about..."

and they look at the file to see it's just the output of wget.
you should try this:
wget -O http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg > hello.jpg

Re:I'd like to

[PlatyPaul]

It's "dhanyavaad", or "shukriya" if you're in an area which is largely influenced by Urdu. :)

Re:I Choose Not to Participate

[Sandbags]

Developers don't need a holiday, they get the opportunity to attend dozens of "developer day" events all over the world. Support staff have their own appreciation day (I can't find a link to what day that is, but our company celebrated it recently). What do IT guys get? Calls at 3AM, ever shrinking budgets, every greater system complexity, and occassionally, if they're lucky, they get a day in a classroom that ends in a test and all they get is a shirt that in many cases I have gotten that actually reads "...and all i got was this lousy t-shirt."

My position is not officially "sys-admin" but I support hundreds of them with my companies backup product and am constantly on remote connections rebuilding servers, diagnosing systems, and personally feel the pain not only of one shop's system troubles, but can attest to the fact that sys admins all over the country have some of the most thankless jobs going. I work 60 hours every week, am wakened frequently from sleep, and spend hours on conference calls with panicking customers, resellers, and site managers. ...and I don't even have to deal with end users!

I barely stay sane in my position, and I don't have budget issues or roll-out deadlines. I don't know how you guys do it. I did it years ago when things were simpler and even then it was a suck job. I've also been a programmer before and can definitively say that even under production deadlines, and the stress of problem solving and code testing, being a coder is a hell of a lot easier than being an admin. It also takes (typically) requires less frequent training on new systems and processes (once you know C++ you're good for 10 years), and programming PAYS BETTER. So any of you coders that bitch about how cushy our job is, I say to you, YOU TRY IT! Being a sys admin sucks almost as working for a city government, and yet hundreds of admins I know DO work for cities, ouch.