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The Life of the Sysadmin
Manuka
sent us a pretty nifty little story from SF Gate that talks about those
heroes of the wodern workpace:
The Sys Admin.
Talks about their charachteristics, their responsibilities
and the lack of respect they get sometimes. Kinda cute.
And you sysadmins out there should show this to your
bosses and ask for raises *grin*.
As a sysadmin at BBN (now owned by GTE) I can tell you the crop of people I've interviewed over the last year has been abysmal. It's especially true of those with training in only NT. I've seen guys who don't know the difference between TCP, UDP, and ICMP and who didn't bother to read up on the OSI model. Many haven't learned even a basic scripting languages like sh (never mind C) yet sell themselves as competent mid-range system engineers. Or how about the guy who had never caculated the power requirements and heat dissipation (hence air conditioning requirements) for a machine room, yet calls himself a Sr. System Administrator. This is the kind of guy who calls in a consultant whenever he needs to get real work done.
And these attitudes are prevalent throughout the industry. It seems to me that much of the problem with acceptance of this kind of blatant incompetence by management is partly because of all these certificate training programs run by businesses like Microsoft and Novell, instead of accepting the standards set forth by nonprofit industry groups like LISA and SAGE. Microsoft isn't in the business of teaching skills, they are in the business of collecting money for handing out certificates. And most businesses would prefer to hire the less skilled admin with a certificate because he/she is cheaper than a good admin with a track record and job history. This is partly because many managers don't have their engineering staff interview potential candidates before hiring; management often seems to express a policy of 'what does an engineer know about hiring someone and conducting an interview???' Well, DUH! 'What does a manager know about engineering??? And why does he/she think they know enough to determine a candidates core competence of the requisite skills for that position???' I figure if you work at a place like this you're better off just looking for another job.
Hell, good admins don't take PHB bullshit too well because they know the next job is a telephone call away. I happen to know I'm good at what I do and deserve every dollar I earn (more, really). But I'm willing to take a cut in pay in order to stretch my skills and learn something new. Where I work we have several hundred Linux, Solaris, and IRIX hosts in our machine room running compute intensive batch jobs for speech modeling, very similar to a Beowulf or GNU/QUEUE cluster (though the software was internally written). This is a useful and fun skill to learn, but working in scientific and software development fields certainly doesn't pay top dollar. Could I double my salary to six figures? Tomorrow. I need only say yes to one of the multiple cold calls I get every week (the six figure offers usually come from financial houses). Now, Would I? And take that shit???? No way!