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Why Your Sysadmin Hates You
jfruh writes "We've learned many lessons in the fallout from Edward Snowden's whistleblowing and flight to Hong Kong, but here's an important one: Never make your sysadmin mad. Even if your organization isn't running a secret, civil-rights violating surveillance program, you're probably managing to annoy your admins in a number of more pedestrian ways that might still have blowback for you. Learn to stay on their good side by going along with their reasonable requests and being specific with your complaints."
So... it has come to this...
Because he's the BOFH, that's why.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
That is all.
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed. That's it. There's no petty revenge or "blowback" to consider.
It's no different to other jobs where people hold a position of power (e.g., police officer, principal, medical doctor, judge, etc). We expect and demand that those people behave professionally and appropriately at all times (even when they don't like you). Just because a computer is involved doesn't excuse a system administrator from being held to the same professional standards.
We've learned many lessons in the fallout from Edward Snowden's whistleblowing and flight to Hong Kong, but here's an important one: Never make your sysadmin mad.
What a silly excuse for linking to (in itself a reasonably good) article on how to relate to sysadmins and IT support in general.
And for those who are not sysadmins: Sysadmins do NOT reveal your company's secrets because some user bypassed the helpdesk system, or run some test code on a production system.
However, nobody should not tolerate that their employer engage in illegal activities. I am not paid to break the law, neither are you. But that is no no way related to being a sysadmin or any other specific position. It is part of being a decent human being.
If you don't go along with reasonable requests and be specific with your complaints, at _work_ for godsakes, then you're way past the point where some blogpost is going to help you.
(Haven't RTFA. "IT World" quite hilariously hasn't got a good enough server to handle a late night slashdotting.)
"You waste your admin's time"
And people hate admins when admins waste their time. Mostly by forcing them to use software or mandatory processes that simply aren't well suited to their problems.
For some reason some sysadmin think they're really special and no one should be able to reach them - go via helpdesk, etc.
I'd like to see those sysadmin having a problem with their checks and being told "no no, you can't talk to anyone in HR or the payroll department directly, are you crazy? Please open a ticket and wait for a reply, an intern will get back to you in 24 hours or less".
He hates anyone that has enough knowledge to question his decisions. Kinda like Religion using Latin to keep their underlings in darkness in the time of the Inquisition.
"It forces us to work harder than needed to find a path to get data off the dead system and onto the new system."
That's not caused by a failure to upgrade hardware. That's caused by a failed or non-existent backup strategy.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed. That's it. There's no petty revenge or "blowback" to consider.
It's no different to other jobs where people hold a position of power (e.g., police officer, principal, medical doctor, judge, etc). We expect and demand that those people behave professionally and appropriately at all times (even when they don't like you). Just because a computer is involved doesn't excuse a system administrator from being held to the same professional standards.
Agree 100%, but that doesn't make the point about don't make your sysadmin hate you. It would not be a good idea to make a police officer, principal, medical doctor, or judge hate you. Sure their professional ethics mean that they should put this to one side when dealing with you, and they could get in trouble if they didn't ... but I wouldn't go picking a fight with one just in case
Because he hates himself?
Or probably because you expect a service from the sysadmin which the users manager did not want to pay for?
Or, you know, maybe treat all your employees and coworkers with respect.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Most of the sysadmins I've had the "pleasure" of working with were simply incompetent. This morning our email was broken. About five hours later I got an email saying it was broken. Awesome stuff there. A couple of months ago I was given a machine to install -- it couldn't. A second one? That couldn't either. The third one I found myself did. Networking problems? I usually locate the problem before our sysadmins.
I've worked with good sysadmins who were efficient and helpful, I've been a sysadmin and know the pressures they face. Competence isn't that difficult.
From someone who's more of a user than a sysadmin: and what about unreasonable requests and lack of knowledge?
In fact, who defines what constitutes a reasonable request, and what's an abuse of power, however slight or ambiguous that abuse may be (say, banning Facebook: sure, employees shouldn't waste company time, but what about downtime when they are between projects or tasks, and have nothing to do)?
What about cases where the user can simply not elaborate on their problem? For all they know, Word is just "not working right", and they know nothing about DLLs, dependencies, and such, so they can't be more specific, like "xyz.dll somehow got removed, and now module abc in Word is throwing an exception whenever I try to print to a PDF. Could you restore it from a backup?"
Also let's not forget that sysadmins themselves, or most of the IT staff (in a non-technological company, at least), are not making money - they are spending it and drawing it. They are there to make sure the accountants, marketeers, and others who can make money for the company can do their jobs. Indispensable as they are to this, they are a cog in the machine (or a transistor to go higher tech), and one that's not in the engine.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
I don't see the connection between whistleblowers and sysads. Anybody could blow the whistle on unethical or illegal practices in an organization. I don't think TFA applies to just sysads. The things in TFA are generally showing a lack of respect. All co workers and employees should be treated with respect. Lots of people in an organization can do damage.
Some of the complaints in the list are legit. For instance, one should not bother a sysadmin with personal requests. But others are less obvious. For instance, I do pop sometimes in their office, especially when I ask for something the "standard" way and then wait for one week with no response, only to find out that they would do nothing unless you pop up in their office.
That's called predicament. Maybe why he hates himself.
Your other post was great, btw.
"7. You test code on production systems"
WTF are you doing having your sysadmins touching the production systems? Why does he care or even know how and where you test your code? I have a lot of respect for the sysadmins and the job they do keeping us productive. But that's like giving the nurse the scalpel and letting him have a go at the patient.
I really wouldn't bother with what I said. It's just a response to the headline. But yeah, if you want to push it, the predicament can cause self-loathing even though it's not the sys-admin's fault.
Your post following is exactly what this thread needed: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3884959&cid=44058295
We have a winner.
Think of a sysadmin as a airplane pilot and stewardess as a helpdesk.
When you're on your flight do you bug a pilot as often as you bug stewardesses? Thought so...
But the sysadmin's time is limited. He also only works XX hours a week. And his day also only has 24 hours. If everyone sees themselves in the right to write to the sysadmin because Firefox is slow, because the password isn't working anymore, because... then the real problems can't get fixed (e.g. a screwed up backup policy left by the previous sysadmin, or a failing front end machine who needs to be transferred to new hardware).
Sure, the user doesn't know why Word isn't working, and he thinks he can just write that guy we met last Christmas party. Turns out, that guy is the Linux guy at the company and he doesn't know either, nor does he care. Now he has to forward that email to the helpdesk himself! If the Help Desk is properly implemented, then going through it is the easiest way for the regular user. Not only it gets him to the right person, but when it does, the right person may already have all the information he needs (because the first level guy asked for a snapshot of the error Word gives).
Indeed, sysadmins are just a cog in the machine. But so is the secretary of the assistant director of whatever. And by screwing up everything, you can't let those cogs perform at their best. You also expect the secretary will tell her boss "You have a meeting at 2 pm with person X in building Y" and not just "you have a meeting today" and wait for his questions "when? where? with whom?" (or the same in reverse when he asks her to put something in the agenda)
Mostly fair enough but I don't think they need to be explicitly thanked just for doing their job well (aside from polite "thanks" at the end of conversations)... there are many other roles that are pivotal in a business; payroll gets us paid, safety dept stops accidents, salespeople find revenue streams, lawyers stop us getting sued, etc. I don't walk around the office thanking these people for doing their jobs, even if they are doing a good job. I appreciate that Sysadmins go through a lot of grief and pressure with some projects and issue fixes but that's because computers are a bitch; but they chose that job. I reckon it's because sysadmins generally think they're more important than they actually are... hehe In closing I would say that I sometimes feel bad because Sysadmins and IT staff do often get put down by the rest of the office... people begin to associate them with problems because that's the only time they engage them. I don't think that's going to change unfortunately.
At one job I spent a lot of time trying to circumvent the helpdesk. Did you know that if network policy forbids you to have automated login after a reboot, you can still do it? Just make a script that sets the correct registry keys, and use the feature where you can run scripts on computer shutdown. The network won't have time to overwrite the registry again. Even the power saving settings of the computer were "administrator only", and we had hundreds of PCs displaying flashy screensavers all night long, because the users didn't want to wait for startup in the morning. Rule no 1: if you forbid something, make sure you have a really good explanation why.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
1. You bypass the help desk system, 2. You're vague.
Both are acceptable providing you schedule your problem as lowest priority. If you submit a ticket, you expect the admin to start working in the earnest, soon. If you signal a problem: "My machine sucks, probably not enough RAM and generally old" you signal the admin to consider you in the next round of purchases. If you say "Wifi reach is dodgy", they will adjust the layout of access points with the next upgrade. "My ethernet cable is loose" - next time they do something in your room, they will replace the plug. It's preferable to a full-blown ticket.
3. You abuse your rights, 4. You do not upgrade.
You want to run obsolete system as root? Be my guest. I may even serve you some advices for free. Still, if I shrug and say "I don't know, you're on your own" you're on your own. I can always get you an upgraded system with limited privileges if you grow tired of trying to fix it yourself.
5. You make urgent, last-minute requests
Scheduled. Expect answer within three workdays.
6. You waste your admin's time
Scheduled. Expect answer within three workdays.
7. You test code on production systems:
You broke it, you take the flak. I can fix it for you if you ask really nice.
8. You make personal requests:
Reward appropriately. Don't expect the admin to do your private work for free.
9. You take your admin for granted:
More importantly - if everything works, don't find work for "slacking" admins. If you see an admin who is constantly busy, he's a poor admin, fixing everything constantly. A good admin slacks all day while all their work is done automatically.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
So, you can fix one problem in your area that affects you before the admin team? Great. What does the fix do to the rest of company? How many other people and problems are the admins working on?
Sounds like you can cope with the really simple stuff, but you've not mentioned anything about scaled up problem solving (believe me, most people can solve a simple network or PC issue; scaling it up to deal with heterogenous systems on a large network is another thing entirely).
I worked on both sides of the help-desk in my time.
Being a computer whizz back then, one is asked of members how to do this or do that. One gets 'programming projects', to pretty-print and sort the download docs, and to Y1999 fix proggies. Still. One acquires a reputation from the newtork lads, because while the fixes work, they were not really in accord with the network aims.
On the other side, one gets to see the strange sort of things users do. They look strange, some work and some dont. Network people see boxes as swappable things, not places where users hide things. Some of the things i used to do there (like drop live icons on the user's desktops), sort of horrified them, but it saved a walk, and a good deal of time.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
The sysadmin's workload is rather special. Maybe you haven't noticed, but getting many "small" requests at unpredictable intervals while you're supposed to be working on something bigger means you never get the big stuff done, you keep on firefighting. If you think that's short-bus special, yes, yes it is. It's no fun.
So you try and gather up the small stuff and do them all at once. You do that with some sort of queue, like, oh, a ticketing system. Doesn't change that most ticketing systems are themselves rather "special", but that's another issue. The point is very simply to bring a little structure in what otherwise looks and feels like wading through diarrhea.
On top of that, this also conveniently keeps track of what sort of request come in, how often and how many of each, possibly how long it takes, that sort of thing. Without some input to produce metrics with, organisations become blind to what their sysadmin does for them. Accountants, on the other hand, are expected to produce a yearly booklet with all that spelled out already.
Then again, sysadmins are far from the only ones that work with ticketing systems or work orders or the forms any bureaucrat loves or similar systems to gather up the ingredients and keep track of the work done.
And fronting with a helpdesk? That is for many reasons, including cost cutting, dishing out prefab answers to frequent questions (a live FAQl, if you will), but also helping people fill out the tickets because, for some reason, they feel too special to do it themselves.
Imagine going to payroll and complain that "the banking system is broken", then you spend half an hour arguing that you're right and they're wrong ("look! the bank doesn't woooork!") until they finally work out, no thanks to you, that somehow your last paycheck must've gotten lost in the mail.
I'm sure that sort of thing happens, it just seems to happen a lot more frequently when computers are involved. Like people see that thing and they stop thinking, or something.
The only time I had a sysadmin hate me it was more due to me documenting their dangerous incompetence.
After a security hole was found in our multi-million daily users web application I was given a project to look into other potential security issues with the application. After trying SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other fun stuff I started to poke into the application server it was running on, and a quick read through the documentation told me how to get diagnostic information from the system- unless it's been disabled as part of the standard installation process. I try it on my dev server, and get the info- not a problem. I try it on the test server and it's the same. I then try the staging server, which should be a copy of the live service, and start to get scared.
After a quick chat with my manager as I wanted to be covered should the system flag me as an attacker I try it on the live service from an external IP address, again the diagnostics appear. I now had our database schema, the network architecture of the live service, and a lot of configuration details. My manager, who'd been watching over my shoulder as they'd become curious now, suggested we test this properly. I used my non-work mobile and called the sysadmin and, using only the details on screen, convinced him I was a database admin from elsewhere in the company working off-site. He was very helpful, I soon had a nicely unofficial SSH tunnel into the network set up for me, a temporary user account on all of the live servers, and root access to the live database with all of our customer details.
Oddly enough the sysadmin didn't think it fair that we'd 'tricked' him, and said that no one would normally see that information and think to do what I'd just done.
Most sysadmins I've worked with have been very good, and the in-department one I'm working with at the moment is absolutely amazing. It's not the case with all sysadmins though, some of them don't need users running random software as root to make things go stupid.
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In which case, what conclusions can be drawn about those managers who, after ignoring reasonable requests without threats to back them up, respond to a threat to back them up by pre-emptive retribution that will merely cause EVEN MORE reason for the sysadmin to sink the company?
Alpha-Idiots?
Wow, you are so smart! Nobody ever thought of firing a bad employee!
Now, what to do when your sysadmin hates you, shows no signs of it, secretly gathers data against you, flees the country, then releases the data?
What now smart ass?!?
I /am/ the sysadmin. I always knew i was bound to hate myself.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
The false premise is that Sysadmins are capable of "liking" someone.
Sysadmins hate everybody. It's the fourth law of quantum bogodynamics.
While I don't see connection here between NSA case (leaker were clearly motivated by politics), sysadmin ethics is one of painful topics not a lot of people like to talk about.
First of all, sysadmining can be a very stressful job, and in IT industry it's one of least favorites. It can pay well - if you have good experience and work ethics along with solid recommendations, but getting there sometimes can make you to ask yourself is it worth it. As you mostly work with human beings full time, your social skills matter and if they are not up for task, you will be frustrated and angry at the end of the day. It's definitely not a job for someone who are very vocal about his/her world view. After all, you provide a service for people with very different POVs. My experience tells - be polite and respective, and people will respond same way.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Only pedophiles, pirates and tax evaders are bad to their sysadmin
Not just this, but personally I want to know what is being done on our PC's, for the simple reason, if it causes another problem (for the user or for the network), if I have the knowledge of what has been done, I can take that into account for the solving of problems.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Users are obsolete.
Users are obsolete.
Users are obsolete.
Obsolete
are
users.
What are users?
Obsolete.
Who is obsolete?
Users.
How would you best describe the relation between users and being obsolete?
The latter being the core characteristics of the former.
Users, obsolete are.
Obsoleteness. Why dost thou plague the users so?
We don't hate you, it's just that we tend to have superiority complexes combined with poor social skills.
If you are a sysadmin who hates his job and/or employer and you are worth your salt, you find a new job, leave, and let all the people you know why you left. Leave little notes on the system and in the documentation that lets your successor know why you left. You don't do petty, unethical, and possibly criminal things. People who do that shit are the reason IT people have a bad reputation. Grow the fuck up, assholes. Either suck it and do your job or find a new job, quit, and leave them without stealing or destroying data or creating more problems for them and the person or people who will be replacing you.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Sure, but by then the damage is likely done. And if the environment that pushed the sysadmin to the dark side remains in place, it will happen again and again.
If ONE sysadmin goes bad, it's likely (but not necessarily) his fault and his breach of professionalism. If it keeps happening, then it's the employer's fault and it is the employer who has breached professionalism.
My problem is not just SysAdmins, but the entire IT department.
I'm a software developer (actually, supervisor of a software development team) at a large multinational that isn't explicitly a software development company. Most people on our network require access to deal with Microsoft Office, our SAP system and a few random databases of stuff with web front ends. Because this is what 'most' employees need, our IT can be strongly against requests that go outside of this.
For doing my job (writing software), I require a Windows system with Administrator rights. This would not be allowed on our corporate network due to policy rules (okay, I get this) so I am a part of a separate network for doing this. However, in order to read my email, I ALSO have to have a computer on our corporate network. One extra box sitting on my desk purely for reading and replying to email. I could use our webmail, but it's pretty cumbersome. When I asked if they could set up IMAP access so I could get rid of the pointless extra box on my desk, the answer was that IMAP is a security hole and for policy reasons, they won't do so.
A part of my job is writing software for mobile devices. In order to test on real devices, I need wireless access. Policy states that no wireless device can be set up other than by IT. IT refuses to touch anything on my separate network; but STILL enforced the policy that if I set up wireless, I'd be getting a very stern talking to by the HR department. Eventually it got sorted, but not before management stepped in due to project delays caused by me and my team only being able to do real device testing AT HOME...
When I decided that my team needed better mouses and keyboards since I myself was noticing some hand strain, I put an order in to our system. Management approved the purchase and it was all fine. IT then blocked it saying that they supply our standard equipment from Dell and we shouldn't be ordering IT equipment separately. It was only after several days of arguing back and forth that they let the purchase order go through on grounds that since it's for my 'separate network' it's not counted as "IT equipment". That also means though that my development PC has a nice mouse and keyboard; but the one I use for email still has a really crappy thing supplied by our IT department and can never change.
I don't have so much to truly complain about, since I do get what I want/need eventually, but from my point of view, they do get in the way of us doing our jobs far more than they help. And I do understand their reasoning - we're a special case and they do a fine job for the other 99% of the company who don't have our requirements. I just wish they'd be a bit more open to working with us instead of actively fighting against us at every turn.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Yeah well if a sysadmin tells me not to make police officers hate me, I'll take the advice.
If a sysadmin tells me not to make sysadmins hate me, I'll take it as self-serving BS if it's not an overt threat. The lesson from the Edward Snowden case is "don't piss off your sysadmin" says a sysadmin. Sysadmins need to get over themselves. They're commodity-grade workers at the end of the day.
A more interesting article would be "Why users hate sysadmins". Then the sysadmins around here might learn something.
Did a stint as the sysadmin, mail admin, web admin, as "other duties as assigned" when my full time job was SUPPOSED to be the lone PE Electrical at a small A/E firm. The OWNERS chose to convert to all "electronic" enterprises software, without a thought to the consequences because some seminar for "executives" told them it would put more money in their pockets, and screw the minions if they can not deal with it!
My lesson from all of this - do NOT blame the sysadmin nor the IT support staff, they rarely are given ANY input into the process, and then the HR department blames them for not having ten years experience with software which was not even sold six months ago.
How about why we hate them! As an experienced Admin I can comment on both sides of the issue. Lets start with the Admin looking at the user:
User:
1) Usually describes the wrong issue in a ticket.
2) Asks for things that don't make sense / are impossible.
3) Wants to configure / install software that they have no idea how it works.
3) Blames the Admin when an update broke Office and Windows.
4) Wants 0 down time even when the down time is needed.
5) Doesn't want to wait when they need a hardware of software fix.
6) Assumes we know everything about every piece of software, like Soildworks.
6) Thinks Windows / Mac are the only operating systems and that everything needs a GUI.
7) Breaks the Preforce and doesn't know why.
Users can be very frustrating and very annoying to work with, a fair amount of users have no idea what they need / want 1/2 the time and don't really know what to ask for. However a good Admin already knows that and is more then willing / ready to clearly explain what they need / want from them. A good Admin won't talk down to a user and won't expect a user to operate at the Admin level.
Lets examine a bad Admin, the kind a user HATES to work with because the Admin is unreasonable / has a complex!
Admin:
1) Can't explain anything properly and acts like the bees knees.
2) Imposes policies that make no sense and refuses to buge on them.
3) Wont entertain user requests that aren't needs, such as making a VM for a user to "play" around in.
4) Won't ask the users what they need!
5) Doesn't listen to managers in meetings when important updates are coming out for software!
5) Thinks that downtime is a right and they don't have to explain it.
6) Hijacks network resources at an unreasonable level slowing the users down with out explaining it before hand.
7) Wont allow discussion between the IT Department and the Users.
8) Won't allow exceptions, even when the exception makes sense and is accepted by managers.
Bad Admin's are more at fault then bad users. I hate when bad Admin's complain about users when in fact the root cause of the user being an asshole is because of the Admin. Your an Admin not a god, you don't have some amazing power that can't be taken away, your a man of the people and not the mayor of awesome town. Face it a bad Admin is more at fault then a bad User and from my experience there are more bad Admins then users. NEVER lie to user when you're an Admin, I've seen so many cases where the Admin will tell a bold face lie and just move on. If you can lie to a user then a user can lie to you and you need to accept it.
I think this submission needs to be flipped, I think the bad Admin should be looked at and not the users, a good Admin will instill trust and corporation between the users and the IT Department, a bad Admin will close the connection and leave both parties upset and ready to leave.
Because I'm just mean.
ROFL
This guy expects the police behave professionally and appropriately at all times
That article is exceptionally well written and insightful.
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed.
A sysadmin once ordered me around in exchange for not deleting my email account. I complained and it turned out that he was a supporter and didn't have permission to the email server. However he did have physical access to it and this being the '90s security wasn't as high as today (at least not with that server). You didn't need passwords when you reached it physically. He received a warning and was out of the job within months, though his nickname "the lazy supporter" didn't help. I don't think I ever saw him do real work.
That does make me wonder if he's not the sort of authoritarian human tornado who thinks the sysadmin is being "unprofessional" and "insubordinate" when he won't roll back one of those Java security updates that broke the boss' MineCraft game.
Didn't really make me hate them but would have been nice if they had a bit of forethought: I worked at a research lab. People would wait till the week they were left to say "wait what do I need to do to take my data with me?". They'd invariably show up on Wednesday with a brand new 1TB drive and say "I can't download this in time before I leave can you do it and my lab will mail it to me?" I'd then find out that they have about 800GB of data that is archived on tape and my day is spent hunting down 3 year old archives restoring them and babysitting rsync. All this could have been avoided if they just bought a external drive when they started and kept their own backup copies all along. Or at least when they months ago were applying for postdocs or whatever said hey I'm going to need my data.
but somehow in most companies financial department is treated with extra care. somehow. maybe because they are exposed to quite a lot of sensitive, internal information. ;)
just because money (wages etc) is involved...
Rich
You are IT just at another section... try working WITH the rest of the team. You do realize that IT policy managers are the police of the corporation along with the safety manager, HR, legal, etc. They exist to keep employees from breaking the law and doing serious harm to the company. They work for the corporation, not you.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Downward, not across.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I started my company 15 years ago, and we've grown to 65 employees. I have 5 very very good "IT" people who are nice to the engineers and are happy to do their jobs. The engineers similarly like the IT people and are happy to work with them to make the company successful.
I don't really understand this rift that seems to exist between IT and its customers, perhaps just because I've never seen it. It doesn't really make sense, though, because the success of the company should be mission #1 for everyone, including IT.
Of course, to that end, my pay structure is a bit different, and highly dependent upon company financials. My base salaries are very very low but profit sharing is immense. That seems to keep everyone focused on what's important. If an engineer gets bogged down in a computer problem and can't be productive, the IT guy knows that his profit sharing is ticking away with every passing second, because the more projects we finish in the year, the more money we make.
Seems to work well...
Disgruntled sysadmins may do many things, many of them poorly thought out or likely to result in bad consequences. But they don't hole up in a hotel room in Hong Kong and publish dirt on the NSA spying program because their users are annoying.
More to the point, if someone is willing to throw the rest of their life away on whistleblowing, then their motivation goes way beyond poor job satisfaction, and a less frustrating work environment is not going to dissuade them.
In what way?
The users wouldn't have an actual clue.
"The sysadmin wouldn't fix my cell phone!"
"The sysadmin wouldn't help me with my email problem, even though he was obviously not doing anything other than staring at the back of the servers."
"The sysadmin was rude to me, just because I asked him to fix the copier. Why do we even have this number above the copier?"
"The sysadmin wouldn't help me with my virus problem on my home computer. How hard can that be?"
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Exactly this.
Snowden wasn't the first one to say those things. And he won't be the last.
Go look up Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I am told by a doctor friend that the police almost never give tickets to doctors because they don't want blowback from a doctor if they are ever on the operating table.
Sounds smart to me.
That is like blaming the accountant for the accounting policies. The sysadmin implement what management decide. If you do not like it, talk to your manager.
"I was just following orders" is a poor argument. If the sysadmin or the accountant is aware that there is a problem that requires management authorization then they have a duty to bring it to the attention of management. The users have a similar obligation but if the problem involves IT or accounting, those departments are the first place to bring the issue up. You go to management once you get some sort of consensus recommendation on a course of action. Furthermore those departments would be rightfully pissed off if someone tried to do an end run around them.
Furthermore, a great many policies are not decided by management but by the IT staff. They may have management's backing but management typically does not have the time to make every decision themselves. If IT tells them that a policy change is a good idea, odds are good management will listen. If a user makes the same request about IT, the first question any good manager should have is whether IT is on board with the proposal.
Because the point of this company is to (build/sell/do) whatever it is we (build/sell/do)... not maintain a bunch of IT infrastructure.
I yet to have an employer who treats sysadmins badly.
Aww, they're so cute when they're young.
And if you treat admins well or very well, the IT becomes a money sink hole, with admins generally caring about their own problems.
Silos are the rot that is pervasive in many companies. In my experience, the larger the company, the more the rot. It is unbelievable how much money is wasted on turf wars, keeping up with the Joneses, trying to sabotage the Joneses and focusing on department first, company last.
If your company's SysAdmins are in the "I only care about my problems/doing less work" instead of the "what can I do to help other people do their jobs easier/better/faster?" mode, then you have The Rot. The worker bees can individually resist The Rot to a limited extent (in the actions they have direct control over), but it really takes all the folks at the exec level to be on the same page and actively working against it to stomp it out.
What the NSA is doing goes well beyond the authorization of the Patriot act.
You need to read the actual text of the Patriot Act, specifically this part:
Title II: Enhanced Surveillance Procedures
Sections 256-282
What is the difference between a sysadmin and a terrorist ? With terrorists one can negotiate...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Get back to work or the auditors will see you're abusing company resources posting irrelevant opinions on Slashdot, and I'll be forced to restrict http access for all users.
This has always worked for me.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
How exactly do accountants and marketeers make money for the company?
Both are cost centers very much like IT. In fact there is only one job (sales) that is not a cost center in any company. However that does not mean they contribute nothing to helping the company make money.
The job of marketing is the creation and maintenance of the perceptions of the relationship between potential and current customers and the company as well as its products. Marketing differs from sales because marketing is only indirectly concerned with the actual generation of sales. Without a positive perception of the company and its products, customers are unlikely to purchase anything unless they have no alternative. Done properly the return on investment for marketing can be and is measured. The effect of good marketing can be seen on the bottom line. You put $X into marketing and sales change by $Y is a key task for any marketing department. Sometimes the relationship between $X and $Y is easy to determine and sometimes it is more difficult.
As for accounting I can speak to that directly since I am an accountant. Accounting is a lot more than just paying the bills and depositing payments received. Accountants are intimately involved in quoting new business, cost reduction activities, production and budget planning, purchasing and more. Profitability comes from revenue minus costs. If you don't understand your costs, you are highly unlikely to be profitable. Accountants job is the help the company understand their costs and thus understand whether and how they are making money. Without accounting the company is quite literally operating blind.
And more so than accounting, IT can also be a differentiator even in non-tech firms.
Spoken well and truly like someone who knows nothing about accounting. Accounting (like IT) can be a very significant differentiator for companies that do it well and I can tell you from first hand experience that many do their accounting quite badly and it hurts them in ways that are easily measured. Efficient accounting operations can help the company win business they would not otherwise and to keep costs low. That is one of the biggest possible differentiators there is.
This may indicate that you are out of synch on this process.
I consider the enduser King
Kinda like customers, if you're a shopowner
Seriously.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
After working under a complete moron that was great with people and project management but had the technical skills of my mom (not good), I have to disagree. I am currently the head IT manager at my new job but I still think that the system administrator or whatever you call the top level IT person should do a perfect job or get replaced. A technician making a mistake is an annoyance but a system admin buying 500 refurbished, off-lease HP desktops that had a failure rate of around 75% in the first year is a LITTLE BIT more major. Everyone should be ready to report their IT boss' incompetence to the owner/CEO/whatever if it's deserved and hopefully they get replaced.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can always put them in jail on trumped up charges when they make a manager's new squeeze cry by yelling at them when you catch them removing the hard drive of the head of IT security's PC.
City police and office politics are a bad mix, especially if the Mayor wants a photo opportunity at the jail "saving the day" and getting the passwords.
I've been doing system support, at many different organizational levels, for over 20 years. In that time I've held every IT support job from help-desk to director. It's my belief that the better a person is at their job, the more likely it is they're a cynical prick (myself included). The problem comes from the fact that a good sysadmin has to look for, understand and mitigate every possibility for problems. Over time it forces you into a "glass half empty" perspective on just about everything business related. It takes a concerted effort to keep that same cynicism creeping into personal interactions. It's my job to make sure there are no surprises so I'll do everything in my power to map out risk. That means if there's a business reason for your request I'll do everything in my power to help you but I'll not put my neck on the line for you. If it's between bending the rules to help you get wifi or me keeping my job and feeding my family you're not going to get that wifi.
Sincerely,
Cynical Prick
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Had a sysadm once, send him an email, a few minutes later, boom, done!
After a couple of years he was promoted, and out of IT. The replacement, messages entered a black hole where you'd have to follow up and pester. You knew the first message was going to be ignored and was just the beginning of a tedius dance.
Before IT people beak off, "Oh, I'm supposed to drop everyhing and help you?" realize it was taking care of little issues instantaneously that made the first guy get glowing reviews.
So, yes, do the opposite of triage. Put laborious things on hold and service quick easy ones. You won't be slowed terribly and will look some 600-800 times better (est.)
If a big server is down, that's one thing, but regular day-to-day? Fix the quick problems quickly.
To those who still feel feisty and wanna argue, enjoy your long stay as a lackey. You've been shown the way.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
To put it more bluntly, 200 "minor issues that can wait" because you're restaging a machine is 200 irritated people. The guy waiting for a restage isn't gonna be pissed it it takes 2 extra hours
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
OP was joking, broheme. Take a chill pill.
Is there any network connection between the two boxes you use?
If so, have you considered trying RDP (mstsc, etc) from one to the other? Add a second monitor to the good machine if that help. It's what I do to run dual OS's without having to use multiple keyboards/mice, and you can't really even tell that my second monitor is actually running stuff on another machine.
Well, yes, but my experience is that even if I've never screamed at an admin, nor informed them of their mothers' extramarital activities, the majority seem to make it their duty to keep me from doing my job anyway.
In fact, for some (I'm looking at the fucktard duo administering the MQ server,) the nicer you are and more willing to explain why you need a queue for the application already approved by anyone who had a legitimate say, the more they'll abuse that and your time by MAKING you have to explain for weeks or get nothing from them. The guys who do tell them to STFU and do their own job, now those get what they asked for.
Now I have sympathy for admins, and understand that other people shit on their day. But WTH does it solve to in turn have them shit on MY day and my coworkers' day?
If X bullied admin Y, and Y bullies innocent bystander Z in turn, what did it solve, other than make an extra person unhappy? And how does the former even excuse the latter, anyway? Much less make it right. Two wrongs don't make a right.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The missing item no. 10 from TFA.
The article is nothing more than a snippy gripe list. Yes, it's fun to think sysadmins should be revered because they wield great power over business internals at a very low level but whining about not getting enough kudos, or being snippy with people, or explaining to someone why their request is a "waste of time" is just being an ass. If someone is being unreasonable and demanding something you know is wrong, talk to your manager and let him/her decide what to do. Nice thing about being an admin is you don't need to make decisions which are outside the policies. You can dump the accountability in the lap of people who are paid to do that job.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
If an employee cannot even convince his/her own manager it is a case worth pursuing, then why should IT bother with it?
I am a manager. I have a staff of about a dozen people that report to me. If one of my employees needs to involve IT for some aspect of their work then they should do that without wasting my time needlessly. If their request could or would impact something beyond their ability to do their own work then sure, come to me first. I expect them to know when something might have external ramifications. I'm fine if they consult me when they are unsure about something but I really do not want them wasting my time (or anyone elses) on issues where I would just have to refer them to IT anyway. I hired smart competent people and I expect them to be able to interact with other parts of our business without asking for permission first. If they need my involvement to make something complicated (and necessary) happen I'm happy to oblige. If I didn't trust them to make reasonable requests and handle issues with IT themselves then I hired the wrong person.
I.T. isn't there to make a profit, it's a cost centre that's there provide what's needed for others to make a profit. The more other sections need expensive stuff from it the more it becomes a "money sink hole". The other things you've described happen when I.T. becomes too isolated. However in large places I.T. is rarely able to spend at the whim of every junior employee so if it doesn't go through somebody high enough up the ladder to have a budget for more than a single paper clip you can forget about it - but that's company policy at work and not I.T.
A lot of the "I.T. won't buy me a pony" bullshit is because a company expects managers to decide if the junior staff get a pony or not, and when they don't get one they decide to make an end run around their management and try to get it from I.T. When they don't get the pony on the sly it is seen as the fault of those evil I.T. people stopping them from doing their work and not the real problem - getting stuck trying to do an end run around company policy.
If ignoring orders is fine, the sysadmin can ignore the orders to fix anything.
Hating everyone is my default state. To be fair, it has very little to do with computers and a lot to do with generalized, willfull ignorance and stupidity (Journalists hold a special, very dark and awful place in my heart), but it wouldn't be any different if I was a CEO, a construction worker, or god forbid, a lawyer.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I've been on both sides of the pond. In some cases your SysAdmin is also the network guy, DBA, Network Security, and sometimes even a bit of a dev all in one role. In others all of the above and more can be separated.
[using the masculine for convenience's sake, but I have worked with some notable female sysadmins]
First point: Like most employee's, a SysAdmin's loyalty should not be to you, but to the company. A lot of people don't get that, and see IT as a roadblock, especially when it comes to security stuff. No, often he's not trying to be a dick by preventing you from doing connecting to your home VPN or setting up a wifi hotspot for your tablet - even if it would make your life a lot easier - he's trying to prevent a security issue.
Second point: Don't get mad at the IT guy for enforcing policy. For example, one person mentioned being tied to a particular vendor for hardware. That policy was likely set by somebody else, but there are reasons. There may be RFP issues for hardware, accounting issues, or they may have just had the common problem with dozens of departments going wild-west with hardware purchases ending up with a lot of incompatible crap.
Third point: Don't be a jerk with the above. If the problem is a policy, work on getting the policy changed, not circumventing it or venting at the IT guy enforcing it.
Last one: Don't burn out the nice guys. It's a tendency in any department to find the nice guy (most helpful, fastest service, whatever) and then bombard him with requests because he's mostly likely to grant them in a timely manner. That increases his stress, which may result in him not being a nice guy for very long.
First hint: This one is for the SysAdmins. Also don't be a jerk. The worse answer you can give is "No" with no qualifier. There are cases where that may be valid (where there's a perfectly well-known policy or somebody is making the same mistake for the 10th time), but a lot of the issues with SysAdmins don't come down to what they're doing, but how they're doing it. Be polite. Be patient.
"Unplug your laptop right now!" is a not nearly so constructive as "we don't allow personal machines on our network/domain because of the risk of infection on our more-vulnerable internal network as we can't verify your antivirus or the integrity of your machine."
Try suggesting alternatives "If you need to take work home, did you know that you can request a company laptop that's preconfigured with VPN access and proper security software?" (and try to get them a machine that works).
Second hint: Try and let somebody else be a hard-ass when it's their job to be so. I've got a generally good repore with my co-workers. I have had to deal with people doing dumb things such as sharing passwords for high-level accounts, attempting to install non-vetting software, etc. If somebody didn't listen to the reasons against doing so ("remember when Bob installed that software that infected the entire shared network drive with a trojan and screwed up everyone's work"), then rather than being vindictive and a jerk, I passed it up the chain to somebody whose job was to deal with such things, usually a manager. Managers are actually pretty good when it comes to dealing with people who are jeopardizing the company (unless they're the ones doing so).
Third hint: Don't be seen taking personal liberties. Yeah, you're the IT guy, you know your shit. You (hopefully) know how to secure your wifi access point and your computer. It doesn't mean you should be doing all the stuff that you tell other people not to do. More especially, you shouldn't be *seen* doing stuff that you tell other people not to do. Sometimes the biggest security risk is the guy arrogant guy with the keys to the castle and a superiority complex.
Last one: For Sysadmins and non-sysadmins. Show appreciation. If a Sysadmin is helpful, let him know you appreciate it. If a client/user is pleasant to deal with, you should let it be known every so often. A little sincere appreciation goes a long way.
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed.
Aye, but how do you know when they're abusing their position of power? Tread lightly out there.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
My favorite is the web server (yeah, the one that powers the company website) that needs reset once or twice a week.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I guess maybe learn something more than running things smarter people wrote and someone might give a shit about your feelings.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-08-28/
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Far be it for me to discourage politeness or considerate behavior towards admins, but the last thing we need is more of fear-mongering of our profession. We should be ashamed of being feared and search out ways to combat that attitude, not gleefully celebrating it and looking for ways to leverage that fear to our personal advantage, becoming little e-terrorists.
The sort of traits that we sysadmins should be emphasizing and popularizing to employers and the public at large are our ethical grounding, our sense of duty and responsibility, the breadth and depth of our knowledge, and our ability to translate end user requests into clear and actionable technical goals. We should be the ultimate technical confidants and friends of those we work with and for, not the necessary evils that they tolerate at their own risk. We should recognize the great responsibility that comes with our roles' great power, and act accordingly.
This whole notion of "fear us, for we drive the bus" that permeates our culture is corrosive, immature, damaging, and actually quite disgusting. I recognize and appreciate the humor of Simon Travaglia's BOFH, but too many of us seem to take those works not as fantastic parody but instead as some sort of literal example, a self-help manual for geeks.
This leads to keyboard jockeys becoming quite like those police officers who lose sight of their roles as responsible civil servants, lost amidst the power of badges and guns and sirens and legal authority. As anyone who has ever had to deal with one of those bad apples knows well, just one such experience can tarnish the reputation of a whole profession, indeed a whole class of people, and make the road much harder for all the rest who are just trying to do their jobs faithfully and well.
Well really it needs to be considered both ways. It's a little like saying, "If a bear is going around attacking people, we should kill it." Still, that doesn't make it less fair to say, "Don't go around poking at wild bears."
If you don't trust your IT support people, fire them. I would suggest that trust is even more important than competence in many cases. Still, be nice to your sysadmin.
If a syadmin is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed. That's it. There's no petty revenge or "blowback" to consider.
It's no different to other jobs where people hold a position of power (e.g., police officer, principal, medical doctor, judge, etc). We expect and demand that those people behave professionally and appropriately at all times (even when they don't like you). Just because a computer is involved doesn't excuse a system administrator from being held to the same professional standards.
There's a difference between abusing power and being fair to all users. If one department or individual continually makes "emergency" last minute requests that they could have made weeks or even months ago, then making everyone else wait while you service the "emergency" request is unfair. So it's not abusing power if a sysadmin team refuses to scramble around to accommodate unreasonable last minute requests. A former manager was fond of responding to those requests with "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part".
The same goes with other users that complain that the "internet is down" when what they really mean is "The online gambling site I use is unreachable". Or the people that complain that their system is too slow and we say "Yeah, you need more RAM for that application, ask your manager to submit a purchase request for more", yet they still keep complaining to IT when IT doesn't have the budget to provide hardware upgrades. It's unfair to other users that work within the system to make them wait while we service requests from "problem users".
because you refuse to READ!
you just gotta love the qualification he used âoeintentionallyâoe. lol
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
however, when managers or owners abuse their power no one complains, and if you do, they label you all kinds of things.
the problem isn't the sys-admin its the manager. like everyone else in this country, sysadmins are overworked and underpaid.
this is management getting mad workers exist that can't be crushed like bugs when they step out of line. The problem is they are affraid, and angry they might have to recognize the powers and abilities of someone who they've labeled bellow them. sysadmins deserve the respect of a proffesional. They don't get it. ever. that needs to change.
Learn to stay on their good side by going along with their reasonable requests and being specific with your complaints.
And if they're not reasonable? It happens.
I am no longer a sysadmin, but I know many, and I listen now to the complainers who complain about their sysadmins, programmers, etc.
I often hear complaints about how stuff doesn't work right, or doesn't do what they want. Their complaints often boil down to 'There ought to be..."
No, there ought not be. Stuff works the way it is built. If it was built wrong and works wrong, that's a fix. If it was built for a task, and you don't like the task, or you don't like the results, well, that's a design problem. Design of the process, not necessarily the tools.
We just had this discussion yesterday about a process that requires us to resolve issues in a limited number of ways. the complaints from others (with much less experience than some of us have) devolved into the complaint that our system should allow for options that don't exist in the systems that are the source of the data we deliver. Put differently, they want our users to see data that they cannot see elsewhere, and in fact is not delivered elsewhere. Despite pointing out that our system merely delivers data, and does so according to the rules of the data owners, they persisted in complaining that our users want this, and it would solve problems.
In this instance, it would solve the problem of users changing things in other systems, and expecting them to stay the same elsewhere. I did not bother to continue to discussion into the realm of our legal constraints. We are a highly regulated business, and what they wanted to do would eventually violate multiple laws. Not understanding that our own internal controls were the first limit, however, made me feel like legality would be similarly lost on them.
If you wonder why sysadmins sometimes consider your requests ludicrous, consider you may not have an ogre for a sysadmin. They may be protecting you from yourself. Or they may know the 'why' you have not yet considered.
And if you can define your request as 'There oughta...', be prepared for the bit NO. No, there doesn't oughta.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Okay, so maybe BasilBrush had a point after all...
(see sig)
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Two hundred minor issues, unless they're all the same issue and are scriptable, is not two hours lost, it's several days, especially with ticket documentation et al (if they're scriptable, it might be far less than two hours). Sometimes two hundred people have to be left angry temporarily because if the server isn't finished being restaged, thousands of people could be angry when the server doesn't get back on line on schedule.
Intranet Tough Guy!
I mean admins of all types. Not just the sysadmin who is the key to your computing life.
Somehow I was lucky to learn early in my career to be nice to admins of all types. The nice people who help you get staples and paper clips and the people whose eyes are bloodshot from being up all night configuring a system. I've been one of the latter.
You can't live without them and it never hurts to show a little human kindness. Some bagels or donuts or simple praise in public go a very, very long way.
Your doctor is right about never getting tickets but wrong about the reason. There was a huge stink several years ago in St Louis where a surgeon was rushing to the hospital to reattach a boy's severed arm, and was pulled over. The doctor pleaded with the god damned cop to let him save the boy's arm, the dirty bastard kept the doctor there for half an hour writing the ticket. The boy lost his arm and it was front page news for a week at the Post Dispatch, the police REALLY got a black eye for it, and the boy's parents sucessfully sued the city for huge sums of money.
That's why cops don't give doctors tickets. It's probably Police Department policy everywhere after that incident.
That is entirely wrong, an introvert might very much want to spend time with people close to them, especially in a stressful situation, but the list of people close to them is very short. If anything I'd be more inclined to seek someone out under stress, even someone not so close, but privately.
Maybe even seeing all close friends at once could be too much, and once close people can slide to the bottom fast if they are out of contact for some time. It goes to where one on one might be ok, but anything else and you might as well be a stranger.
If you have a friend like me, I hope you understand at least, it's not that they don't enjoy time with you - in a private setting.
The sytem must keep working, at all cost. If what you are doing could affect that goal, probably will take it as something bad.
As sysadmin I resent when i got ordered to do something that will hurt the systems i administer in a "wrong" way (specially if there is a right, but dismissed without knowledge, way, to do the same with no or minimal impact), is not about the power that you have as sysadmin, but the responsibility.
Yeah well if a sysadmin tells me not to make police officers hate me, I'll take the advice.
If a sysadmin tells me not to make sysadmins hate me, I'll take it as self-serving BS if it's not an overt threat. The lesson from the Edward Snowden case is "don't piss off your sysadmin" says a sysadmin. Sysadmins need to get over themselves. They're commodity-grade workers at the end of the day.
A more interesting article would be "Why users hate sysadmins". Then the sysadmins around here might learn something.
Threat, friendly advice, you be the judge. "Commodity-grade" workers or not, you rely on them to be able to do your job. Do you piss off waiters before they bring your food? You shouldn't.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
No just the one that broke the Drobo
I hate my users and they are all enterprise architects with 20+ yrs experience on at least 10 different platforms.
Why?
* They ask for things and do not provide a reasonable budget, any timeframe, and zero written requirements, then get mad when I haven't done **anything** about it.
* They think it is easier to call me, leave a message about some problem, than to google 30 seconds and find an answer themselves. I get to the issue in a few days and call them back - "Oh, I solved that days ago." Gee, thanks.
* I'm always asked how to configure email clients, IM, and proxy settings over and over and over. The settings haven't changed in 8 yrs. SAVE THE DAMN EMAIL people! Check the damn wiki where all this stuff is stored. Don't bother me.
* They think verbally telling me anything carries any weight. It doesn't. A clearly written email is mandatory if they want me to handle anything correctly.
* 8 yrs ago, they wanted, needed, had-to-have a project management website. I setup the one they wanted and we used it for 3 months. I patched it, maintained it, ran it for 3 yrs before I took it off-line and never mentioned that to anyone. It has been 5 yrs and **nobody** has said anything about it being down. Not once. Why should I bother?
BTW, I own over 1/3rd of the company, so my time is definitely worth more than whatever they are paying me.
*cough*
(You are being equally idiotic.)
When developing a product, one should attempt to anticipate points of failure, and incorporate failsafes and safety systems into the design to make it fail gracefully, instead of spectacularly. For example, if the function you just made deals with input from an outside module in the form of a pointer, it is simply prudent to sanity check the inputs when that function fires to ensure that it hasn't been fed a null pointer. If designing an electrical system that absolutely, positively must have the polarity right on the power feed, (say, it has high voltages and lytic capacitors involved), then make the power connector physically impossible to get flipped over.
These are simple things that are clearly aparent on design time, and can be incorporated on the beta of the project.
Dealing with unforseeable situations, like "use on systems with both MesaGL and vendor proprietary openGL libraries installed causes erronious and unpredictable behavior" (because the proprietary driver does a SneakyDumbTrick() that is completely off spec, and is part of the vendor's secret sauce, and expects only its own libraries installed and expects such nonstandard behaviors from other parts of the opengl implementation, which the standards compliant mesa lib just doesn't do, causing [crazy_shit] to happen when the proprietary lib calls part of the mesa lib for service, due to the heterogenous install), that kind of thing simply can't really be predicted, because the developer/engineer can't read minds, and know in advance what kinds of shennanigans can happen there. As such, it can only be dealt with after it has happened before.
"Ditzy soccermom drives off with pump handle still in tank" is the former kind of problem. "Aluminum bearing races, coupled with steel ball bearings, and bearing lubricant under high vibrational environments with lots of ambient particulate matter in the environment leads to rapid deterioration of bearing race as particulates accumulate in lubricant, erode the race, and cause runaway deterioration, enhanced by chatter from the vibration" on a bearing that was designed for a clean and sealed environment and for minimal weight with low noise is the latter.
If you try to think of every possible thing that can ever possibly go wrong, and design your systems that way, you are not a very good engineer. Likewise, if you put your head in the ground, and ignore the fact that the product will be used in ways and environments other than the perfectly ideal conditions for operation, and end up making a very fragile product, you likewise aren't a very good engineer.
The secret sauce is dealing with all the low hanging fruit on the potential problems sides of things, and then responding to real world deployments in an iterative manner later. Realworld deployments may have you finding your software running in a configuration you would never have even dreamed of, and may in fact, be very frequently employed that way, because of other silly requirements of the real world. That's where iterative design changes come in.
Gas&Go Gladdys at the gaspump is a low hanging fruit. So are things like gas cutoffs on furnaces, and the like. A furnace that doesn't check that the pilot light is lit using a thermocoupler is simply poorly designed. The engineer should have dealt with that low hanging fruit before houses started blowing up. Etc. Low hanging fruit are things that are clearly obvious at design time.
Arguing "you have to think of *EVERYTHING!*" will end up with your product having so many failsafes in it that is prohibitively expensive to build (either has lots of expensive physical parts that should never actually activate during normal use, and are there only to deal with a hypothetical problem that in practice, never happens, or has more input sanity check code than the function itself, and suffers performance bottlenecks looking for exceptions that never actually happen in practice.). Arguing "No its an iterative process exclusively!" M
If a Manager is abusing their position of power then they need to be removed. That's it. There's no petty revenge or "blowback" to consider.
See how far you get with that one.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"There are some who we'd lay down in traffic for, "
I'd be willing for some to lay down at 10mb, maybe even 100mb. But Gb? Hell no!
Actually the only people who hates sysadmins are DevOps people coming from a development background. They think sysadmins know nothing and they are here to teach sysadmins a thing or two. In the process they screw up all the well established processes that ensures production system stability and quick turnaround. A simple change that could have been done through ssh multiplexer and shell script now needs a series of scrum meetings, sprint , agile voodoo board, developers arrogance and still gets done six months after it was originally requested for. And all in freaking ruby whereas there used to be nice and beautiful pearl or shell script.
you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
I have a simple solution: Follow me around for a day (and a night).
Watch when the new guy gets ignored by his team members and forgets that Google exists so he comes to us expecting days of basic training on how to do his job.
Never answer a question directly. Require your Padawan to ALWAYS ASK THE DUCK before they bother you. If the duck can't answer the question, then it is okay to ask you. If you don't know the answer, then YOU need to ask the duck. Learn this lesson, you must.
Yeah, right.
Yeah well if a sysadmin tells me not to make police officers hate me, I'll take the advice.
If a sysadmin tells me not to make sysadmins hate me, I'll take it as self-serving BS if it's not an overt threat.
So what if a police officer tells you not to make police officers hate you? Same self serving BS? Don't make anyone hate you seems to be a good idea to me.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Your sysadmin hates you because he is a sysadmin in the same way that your cat hates you because he is a cat.
"Dude, pounds are so metric, fuck that." - Noah
brilliant. you got it.
Accellion terminated me after I discovered that they had ~4500 watts of equipment plugged into one 20-amp circuit ... and, rather than fixing it, they ordered me to deploy a VLAN exclusively for their wireless gadgets (they were suffering DHCP address depletion), pronto, instead.
It wasn't possible to deploy a VLAN pronto, because their network had grown piecemeal, not all of the switches were the same version, and VLAN interoperability was not a given.
While trying to diagram the network topology (working alone, without help), I was being accused, by my manager, of "analysis paralysis".
I don't mind saying that my manager ordered me to purchase all of our UPS equipment from an unapproved vendor, and, personally, I suspect that he might have been receiving a kickback - what prosecutors call, "embezzlement".
Maybe thats why he was in such a hurry to terminate me, without even letting HR meet with me, first.
God, am I sick of working for stupid, crooked, dishonest management.
I have reduced someone to tears.
They asked for unreasonable.
I denied.
Head of Division trumps me.
Disaster happens.
I explain it till she cries.
Head of Division says people don't care, they just want to get work done.
Rinse, lather, repeat.