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Managing Young Sys Admins At Oregon State Open Source Lab
mstansberry writes "Lance Albertson, architect and systems administrator at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, uses a sys admin staff of 18-21-year-old undergrads to manage servers for some high-profile, open-source projects (Linux Master Kernel, Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Drupal to name a few). In this Q&A, Albertson talks about the challenges of using young sys admins and the lab's plans to move from Cfengine to Puppet for systems management."
The main thing that people that age need to learn (both professionally and personally) is that Their Actions Have Consequences.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Young people with their heads on straight. Definitely newsworthy.
I know the whole "you young'un, you can't manage a server to save your life!" feeling and all that, but really... is managing a server, even an important one, really that hard - when you have someone to go to when you have questions? A lot of lab administration seems to be finding problems before they become a real problem, which is time consuming.
You may as well have a story about dental work done by *gasp* dental students and, lo and behold, they are actually doing a good job! Shocking. To think that young people could actually learn something. :)
OTOH, it's interesting to read about the difficulties he brings up. They're pretty ... boring, IMO.
It generally takes around six months for a student to feel comfortable with our environment.
Like most jobs?
Another challenge is the short turnaround with students, as we usually only have them for two to three years before they graduate. This creates a constant issue to ensure our documentation and training is honed.
Two to three years, that's not too short, is it? And it's interesting that it's an "issue" to him to keep their documentation good/honed. I hope the graduates are learning that documentation is a BIG ISSUE in real jobs, for exactly that purpose: if something happens to you, the business can't just stop for 3 months while someone else tries to figure out what you did :)
Great that the university is giving these newbies a chance to get their feet wet before they venture into the real world. This type of opportunity is what i fine lacking while I was going to school and I had to search this type of opportunity out for myself.
One of the biggest problem I find when you first enter into the IT field as a student is that there is a lack of on the job hands on training. Students really need to be expose to hands on materials more to reinforce what they've learned in text books and labs.
I would have to agree with your statement. As a soon-to-be graduate of Virginia Tech in Computer Science and Finance, the CS department's curriculum has about 2.5 years of programming before you even see any SA classes (of which cover a very limited area). It's almost as though the message is that one needs to be a good programmer (perhaps exposed programmer would be more appropriate) in order to be a good system administrator, which I don't believe is the case. I thoroughly enjoy net/sys administration and am a terrible programmer. It would certainly be nice to see these two coexist without one being such a prerequisite. It would also be nice for courses to prepare the students better for certifications, which hold a lot of weight in the corporate IT world.
The nasty trick is that, while not touching systems is very, very bad practice, being the first guy to touch something that hasn't been touched in a while is not a pleasant thing.
In an ideal world, all systems get regular attention and everything hums along smoothly. In a less ideal world, people are distracted from what is working by what isn't working, and their knowledge gradually atrophies, until they no longer dare touch what is working for fear of making it join what isn't working. This is a thoroughly pathological situation; but, if you are stuck in it, Just Not Touching and hoping for the best is quite possibly more logical than biting the bullet and taking one for the team.
While entry-level programmers may make a slightly higher salary than a similar systems administrator, over time there's a lot more upward opportunity for the sysadmin. Systems Engineering and Systems Architecture - being the guy that ties the network, the server, and the apps together, is a very in-demand skill and is something programmers will never have the opportunity to become. Programmers only make the big bucks when they have other specialized knowledge that's specific to the apps they are developing, i.e. finance, GIS, physics, etc..
I'm personally glad I made the decision 12 years ago to move into systems after earning my Comp. Sci. degree. I went from web app development for an ISP to Linux/Solaris/HPUX sysadmin, to Systems Architecure, to Info Security.
Sorry, there is no such thing as an 18-21 year old sys admin.
There are plenty of kids pretending to be admins that are 18-21 years old, but just because someone gives you root, doesn't make you an admin anymore than installing mysql and creating a table makes you a DBA.
Having root on a Linux box doesn't make you an admin, regardless of how ignorant you are of that fact.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I've got to assume that you aren't a sysadmin, from your tone. At least, if you /are/ a sysadmin, you haven't really thought too much about it.
Properly executed, systems administration is a far more difficult than the non-system admin (or even the casual sysadmin) realizes. Disaster and recovery planning, performance tuning, infrastructure design, these aren't small-brain tasks. There's a big difference between adding users and managing an infrastructure, and yet, sysadmins do both.
Don't knock the profession just because your experiences with them have been less than ideal.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
It's not the work ethic. It's temperment, the whole attitude towards things. As a developer, I'm very uncomfortable working on production systems, because there's a lot of walking-on-eggshells. If something goes wrong in the dev or QA environments, I can do a lot of "OK, try this... try this... try this", and if one of those things brings the environment down in flames, such is life. When I find the right combination it can be restored to the original broken state, then I can re-apply the thing I think worked, and if that works, I can then hand that off to ops to put on the production system with some confidence that it will work.
If a production environment has some problem which has to be corrected "live", though, that's a very BAD way to try to fix it, for obvious reasons. Instead, a lot more passive analysis has to be done before trying anything, and more important than "will this fix the problem" is "will this bring the system down (worse than it is) or worse, destroy customer data". And since when a developer is called in to help with production there's probably a major problem, the developer usually has to deal with the ops folks and management breathing down his neck as well.
And you wonder why people don't like your type...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
No, they weren't excellent developers.
They may have been great code monkeys, but those are literally a dime a dozen if you don't mind importing from India.
A GOOD developer is also a GOOD sysadmin.
I've been doing both for ~15 years, in that time, I've met 2 good developers. The rest have are monkeys who write code, many of which who write well. Maybe in the next 15 to 30 years I'll meet a few more. With everything going networked now days, you have to be a good sysadmin to understand how to write software that admins can use.
You don't write an apache webserver type application without being an admin, you just don't know what you are trying to hit. This isn't unique to developers writing for admins, its true for all development. If you don't know how to do and have experience doing what the software is supposed to be used for then its practically impossible for you to write software that doesn't suck. This is why there isn't a point of sale system on the planet that isn't asstastic. You'll be hard pressed to find a developer now days who actually had a job when they bothered to pay attention enough to know what good POS software needs to do.
Interestingly enough, I've never met a CS student or recent grad who was even a good code monkey. After several bad experiences our company has developed a 'no CS grad' policy for developers. We'll take you after you have 5 years or more experience, but with less than that all you are is an arrogant asshole who thinks he deserves to get paid ridiculous amounts of money and you still spend a few years breaking them down into something useful. (Read: removing the arrogance of youth and learning that there is far more software AND administration than just writing code or installing Linux)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well, I haven't seen someone display such blatant ignorance while calling someone with a clue ignorant for quite some time, so I guess I'll set the record straight ...
That is an absurd thing to say, and the irony is that you claim to be a great sysadmin, but can't figure out that a good sysadmin doesn't have ignorant users (at least not for long.)
And how do you plan to accomplish that while leaving them ignorant? You'd be surprised how much happier users are when you actually know how to do your job and educate the users so that they understand why something has to be done the way it does.
Are you fscking serious? Why the hell do you think they came up with /etc/motd ? (Message Of The Day for those who don't know and are following along.) If you are doing your job right then users know when backups happen. They know what new software you are installing, and when; you have visibility.
Maybe he has people similar to you setting the bar ;-)
Non-disclaimer: I was a VAX/VMS system manager at the age of 22, having been professionally trained by DEC at their Burlington Training facility, and I have been involved in various aspects of technology from sysadmin, hardware and software development, SQA my entire adult life (I'm now "over the hill"). I have had to deal with idiots like the parent my whole life, and his/her/it's attitude is outdone only by phenomenal cluelessness.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
99.99 of sysadmin'ing comes from experience, which young ones do not have, or are in the process of learning (90% of the time due to necessity, being the low person on the totem). the experienced ones know enough to know that experience isn't cheap.
"...our company now has a policy of not hiring anyone out of college with less than 5 years work experience"
Wow, good luck with that. So where are CS graduates supposed to get this 5 years of work experience if everyone hires like your company?
The ideal combination would be for them to administer live systems and test systems at the same time, e.g. have access to both.
And utilize change control.
Use test systems to experiment and learn. Make proposals to accomplish tasks/maintenance that need to be done to live systems (such as upgrades).
On lab systems, they test/experiment with their proposed administration procedures/configuration changes. Before using them in the maintenance of live systems, they document what they plan to do step by step, and two other admins, a "partner", and a senior admin go over the procedure with them, question them about any apparent gaps, lookup any missing information needed, and take a copy of the procedure.
Then at the planned time, the young admin will run the procedure exactly as documented.
If they need help, or something (bad) should happen to them in the middle (e.g. they tripped over something, broke a leg, or broke their keyboard in the middle of maintenance), such that they can't complete the maintenance task, or get stuck, the other two admins both agree to be available to help and pick up if necessary.