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System Admin's Unit of Production?
RailGunSally writes "I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *nix systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore bean-counter from hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing 'metrics' on absolutely everything from system utilization to paper clip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdot community: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?"
Why worry? If you've got enough time to post stories to Slashdot you're clearly very efficient.
Photos.
>If you save 2 mins a day over 200 days in a year that you drive, over some 50 years that you drive, you just saved two full weeks of >your live by passing 'that guy.'
There's an argument to be made also for just getting a much better, more comfortable car, better audio, etc.
There might be a statistical argument to suggest that frequent "passing" may shorten your life by 40-60 years.
Just make your car comfortable enough that those extra minutes don't seem like a waste.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Thank you! Finally, an answer I can give to people who insist on extrapolating my (carefully created) math to unusual circumstances! ("But I save BLAH by driving 95 instead of 65," "But I save BLAH by driving 75 instead of 65 for 3,500 miles").
Frankly, when moderating, I automatically set responses to sigs as "off-topic".
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
i think you mean people moving more slowly relative to the causes of their death die sooner.
Since we're already talking about your sig and we'll all get modded into Off-Topic Hell...
The longest leg of my commute to work is 16 miles. The speed limit for this entire leg is 65mph. The vehicle I drive has cruise control so, barring accidents or those annoying people who team up to go 45mph in both lanes side by side for six miles, I have ample opportunity to test these kinds of theories.
In short, given no obstacles, I have noticed a difference of nearly five minutes between 80mph and 65mph for the duration of that leg. My high-school level math tells me that this should be impossible; at 65mph the trip should take about 14 mins 45 secs. At 80mph it should take exactly 12 mins, for a difference of just under three minutes. Where did the other two minutes go?
My speedometer gear is in the transfer case of my vehicle, so it is measuring the rotation speed of the rear drive shaft and not the rotation speed of the wheels, so perhaps that has something to do with it; i.e. maybe I'm going faster than I think I am.
Needless to say, this has kept me up nights (not really, but it IS annoying).