Slashdot Mirror
How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT?
Tsunayoshi writes "My son volunteered me to give a presentation on what I do for a living for career day at his elementary school. I need to come up with a roughly 20-minute presentation to be given to 4-5 different classrooms. I am a systems administrator, primarily Unix/Linux and enterprise NAS/SAN storage, working for an aerospace company. I was thinking something along the lines of explaining how some everyday things they experience (websites, telephone systems, etc.) all depend on servers, and those servers are maintained by systems administrators. I was also going to talk about what I do specifically, which is maintain the computer systems that allow the really smart rocket scientists to get things into space. Am I on the right track? Can anyone suggest some good (and cheap/easy to make) visual aids?"
How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT?
Apparently most of them worked for Microsoft to design and code Vista and Office 2007, so it shouldn't be a problem.
how about explaining to us what the fuck you guys do. Seriously. Other than, X broke because we didn't set it up to handle infinitely predictable situation Y (harddrive filled up, fuck eh? heard of log rolling?) and completely failing to have a backup solution that can actually result in being able to restore someone's files from a backup, what exactly is it? I know you guys make firewall rules.. and you change them now and then.. completely fucking up everything that was working just fine thank you every now and then, but surely that's just one sysadmin making work for another sysadmin isn't it? I can see why so many companies are greeting outsourcing of basic shit like email and revision control and backup with open arms. With that out of the way all you guys have to do is make sure the desktops are working........ which currently you never have time to do.
How we know is more important than what we know.