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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."
Because he's the BOFH, that's why.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It has.
Managers have to be forced by pressure of fear (a.k.a. "terrorized") into going along with reasonable request by employees.
It is a sad day indeed.
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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.
"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.
Managers have to be forced by pressure of fear (a.k.a. "terrorized") into going along with reasonable request by employees.
I generally prefer to hire professionals and behave like one myself. Then I don't have to worry about all this kiddy-playground shit.
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
If you have a question about a password reset, then it is cheaper to go through the Helpdesk, this is not about arrogance (for most anyway), let the sysadmin solve the tough problems, let him update his hard and software.
You don't ask a brainsurgeon about a pimple.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I worked one of those places. They had a lease on the copiers and the lease included things like toner and such, with a number on every copier to the office manager, and directions to call if there was a problem, low toner, out of paper, etc. But the "experts" at marketing would fill it up with paper, getting lots of jams, and change the toner themselves, breaking the printer and toner cartridge (yes, I know that's hard to do, but they managed), and calling the IT department when things went bad. We'd call the office manager. So many people there had the idea that if it had an electric cord, IT was in charge of it, from coffee machine to light bulbs, it was all IT. Educating them made them mad, and they'd threaten to call the president on you (not CEO, but Barak). God I'm happy I don't have to deal with users anymore.
Learn to love Alaska
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)
Hardly -> sysadmins just realize that 99% of all user problems can be solved by the help-desk, and be done in a more pleasant manner than a sysadmin will do it. A sysadmin's speech and mannerisms are not laden with the fluff language that people consider being polite -> they have a lot of things to accomplish during the day, are perpetually running behind schedule, and tend to interact with people who understand that when a sysadmin says "Do this," there is a "Please" prefixed to it. We've tried it the other way, with people having constant contact with sysadmins, and people bitched incessantly that they weren't communicative enough (a sysadmin knows exactly what he / she is talking about, spending 30 minutes looking for an analogy to explain something to someone who thinks the monitor is the computer is really stressful) or that they weren't servicing them fast enough (sysadmin has a server go down, needs to get it back up; someone complains that the sysadmin wasn't working on their laptop during that time).
And yes, those sysadmins do run into problems with other departments. Surprise! When they need to call an equipment manufacturer to get some firmware only available by phone call, and need to sit through the various escalations and so on, they feel the pain. It really isn't them purposefully being dicks to you, it really is a limited resource / time thing. Why not stock the help desk with sysadmins, instead of low-level techs? Because it would cost too much.
Everyone wants access to the people who can solve their problems in a few snaps of a finger, or who can remove a lot of the 'unnecessary work' that they are going to encounter. But that means in a company of 200 people at least 20 people dropping by for a 10 minute chat per day. Companies / organizations, who actually pay the sysadmin's salary, want him / her working where they will do the most good for the company; everyone below VP or CEO gets the help desk, everyone above gets the sysadmin. It sucks, and you'll see sysadmins volunteer their time to help out with more trivial problems when they have nothing else on their platter, but that's something of a rarity.
Do you know what sysadmins do? Are they just a better version of tech support so far as you are concerned? Consider a network admin -> to a user, they look like a very highly priced tech support guy; to anyone with any knowledge of tech, that doesn't even begin to describe what they do. They're management. They have purchase power, they plan future designs, they execute those implementations, etc. They report to the IT director, or the CIO, or the CEO. But to the average user, they're just a funny guy with eclectic tastes, who knows the ins and outs of the entire network, and is the guy they want to fix all their problems, personally. A funny guy, who's there at weird hours sometimes...who has access to every room....all emails, voicemails, etc....and which those who actually understand what his / her duties are, tend to avoid getting on their bad-side, even if their professionalism practically guarantees that they'd never do anything in retaliation. A funny guy who usually reports to the IT director, or to the CIO, or the CEO directly.
I am John Hurt.
If there is someone in your company, who is in a position that management can not show is making the company money, then the problem is that said person should not be in the company, or optionally you have incompetent managment.
You may think that most IT staff in a non-technological company is not making money, but someone along the line did something you are unable to. They looked at the ability of each individual that you think is 'making money' for the company, and evaluated whether that person would be able to make more than the cost of the additional support person if a support person was hired, and what the expected return on investment in that person would be before they even opened that position for a manager.
_Every_ person working at a company is expected to contribute to the company's botom line. If they are in a position that doesn't contribute in some way or another, they don't belong.
And if you continue to treat your IT staff as if they don't belong to the company, because you are incompetent enough that you don't understand how vital your IT department is to your company, you are contributing to the sense that your IT staff doesn't belong, and you should expect that your IT staff will recognize that, and treat you like the enemy of your company that you are treating them as. And if you are in upper management and are treating your IT staff this way, you should expect no loyalty from anyone in your IT staff.
And in your example, the user does know more than 'Word is just not working right.' they know that when they attempt to print a PDF, Word does something unexpected. (put up a dialog with strange content, closes, makes the screen start doing odd things...) In most cases the fact that the user can only say 'Word is not working right' means that an IT tech has to come to the desk the user is at, or possibly gain remote access through an internally approved remote desktop support platform, and find out exactly what the user is doing that causes the problem to happen.
As for Facebook or other social sites, it's very rare that your IT department has specified those decisions. Almost everyone in your IT department knows full well that social websites, news sites, and e-mail sites on the web are almost invariable safer for your computer than the internal e-mail system and very likely the intranet environment that you have in house. In almost every case, the reason that your corporate policies marke these resources off limits has to do with the perception of the people making policy with respect to what they expect that employees will be doing on these sites, and how that will affect performance. In some companies there may be liability issues as well related to the possibility that internal information may end up becoming generally available on the internet, which can open the company to liability for privacy issues through insider trading issues and worse.
You never know...
They just don't serve my interests
Indeed they don't. They serve the interests of the company. You as an individual are not the company nor are you or your department the most imporant part of the company (not even considering whatever reason you may think you have).
nor are they there to help me and my colleagues get the job done.
Indeed they are not. They are there to help you, your colleagues and every other employee in the company get their job done right.
They are there first and foremost to justify their own existence, to increase their presence, and to make their job as easy as possible. Actually helping us is secondary.
Indeed they are. Their performance is judged by cost, just like your own department. You may be in a department that also generates profit but IT departments don't generate profits and are judged primarily by cost. Cost is probably why they calculated supporting your old printer is more expensive than sharing a single printer with outsourced maintenance. Feel free to increase the cost of your own department by giving the IT department money to supply you with a new printer and the additional expenses required to support it.
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I think that may be the first time I have seen "reasonable request" and "sysadmin" in the same sentence.
The sysadmins I encounter are invariably anything but reasonable. Aloof, patronizing, condescending... all of those. Most have a very narrow specialization niche and absolutely no social skills or business experience.
I have seen them reduce naive users to tears and effectively discourage any user from making a request of any kind.
It's not that nobody should be able to reach them. As an sysadmin role myself at the mo (I've worked in most jobs in IT over the years), it's a case that I've only got time to field a limited set of things. These are the things that change the big picture in the infrastructure, and that's what takes most of my time.
I'd like to be able to help out more with the individual systems, seriously... The techs that get to go out and fix the small problems are the knights in shining armour; they get to fix the smaller mistakes that users get themselves into (oops, I accidentally deleted some files, oh my PC works again now you've fixed it, so on).
The people that do know me are the heads of departments; they filter in requests that make a business sense to them, and request that they be implemented as a technical solution. Things relevant to the business in the wider scope make it to me.
When I took on the role, it had an inordinate amount of calls from users who wanted to short circuit the help desk (no logging means we can't prove we've done the work to the accountants for a start). Everyone's work, to them, is top priority, after all, it's they who are affected. It took a while to get that under control, and even to people who I consider friends in the organisation, if it's one PC that's affected, it really isn't my problem. If a thousand are, it probably is my problem.
To run a company, roles need a frame of reference. Some make the mistake of believing their frame is the whole of everything that is (hint, it's not). The further you work from your core frame, the less effective you are at doing the core work. If you find your strengths are in a different frame, you're in the wrong job, so change that.
Assuming you should be able to go direct to the admin assumes you know the technical impact of the problem you have (in the enterprise wide scope), know exactly how to describe it, how it's impacting every other system, the amount of users affected and a whole host of things (which is a picture that's built up by the Helpdesk and escalates through the technicians). If you've spent time doing that, what have you been doing in your real job? There may be many people with your level of skill also phoning the help desk, and they may have different views and conclusions based on a different geographic/business perspective.
Doing things the right way lets an accurate picture be built. If all 5k+ staff phoned me in a huge incident, I'd neither be able to get a real picture of it, communicate with the people I needed to, nor actually talk to most people. I'd also not be fixing the problem, which is the real kicker.
Incidentally, HR does work that way; it's the only way they can research the query, and give me an accurate answer that lets me work on a factual basis (rather than "Oh, I seem to remember that it's something to do with X. Probably. Bye then."
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.
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.
I have a simple solution: Follow me around for a day (and a night).
Watch what happens when two people, either of whom could fire both of us, issue demands that are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive.
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.
Watch when the workaholic engineer expects us to be there around the clock for everything from new machines to coffee runs as he compulsively works his 72-hour shifts.
Watch when we spend six hours fixing a machine somebody botched horribly because we told them to push button A then button B then button C, but they pushed button B then button A then button C. For the third time.
Watch when Mr. Hot Temper screams at us for 15 minutes because the network is down, even though not only are we not permitted to do anything with the network, we're not even allowed into the wiring closet.
Watch how we're never thanked for anything, but we're informed on a regular basis as to what people think our mothers did for a living.
I could go on, but rest assured, you'll want your own job back.
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.
...so how long have you had this sense of entitlement?
Since it's my job to 'do my job' I feel I should be entitled to the tools and environment that allows me to do so. If I don't get the tools and environment to do my job, then I refuse to accept responsibility for not getting it done.
Since I actually have pride in my company (and feel that in return, the company treats me with respect in general) and am not just some mercenary out for the money only, I CARE about doing a good job. If I didn't, I'd just sit back and every time someone asks me why the project isn't done yet just say "because IT won't let us". It'd be easier, but significantly less fulfilling.
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and the competent ones seem lazy and useless because the systems stay running day after day, night after night and you don't SEE them doing anything
That's not the fault of the end user, but of whoever designed the system (which I realize may not be you). Don't design a software or hardware package that's so easy to inadvertently break!
Thanks, I'll pass your feedback on to procurement to forward to the vendor that they chose without consulting us.
To take things a step further, IT works behind a door that only IT badges can open, and their only (public) phone number is just a human who will create a ticket for you (if for example, your problem is that your PC won't boot, so you can't create a ticket yourself).
You do realize that you've set up your department to be outsourced? If you have no real connection to the rest of the business except through trouble tickets, then there's no real benefit to your department being in-house at all.
IT should be actively engaged with the rest of the business, trying to find ways to make things work better for everyone. That's our job: to make other people's jobs more efficient (and easier).
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.
Heh, all that reminds me, one time I sent an email compliment to an HR lady, something simple like, "nice event," and she forwarded it to the rest of the HR department and was profusely appreciative.
Sometimes it's amazing how easy it is to get along with these service people just by complimenting them once or twice.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IT should be actively engaged with the rest of the business, trying to find ways to make things work better for everyone. That's our job: to make other people's jobs more efficient (and easier).
I would agree. I walk through every morning saying hello to everybody and asking if everything is working properly. Everybody knows I am the IT guy and has me do stuff right then rather than getting frustrated with whatever is not working. I may not actually get everything fixed any quicker than if I only fielded tickets, but the perception that it is getting done quicker is there. Meanwhile, the workers are all happy and doing work, which means their managers are happy so they tell my manager what a wonderful job I'm doing instead of yelling at him, which means my manager is happy. Meanwhile, I get written recommendations, cookies, gift cards, and the knowledge of all the secret office candy stashes.