I agree with Evan that you (Adam) have shared perhaps the best insights with us, so far. Thank you!
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 06:43, Adam Levin <[email protected]> wrote: > our various employers about how we should be spending our time. Some of > us come from strong technology backgrounds like computer science and > software engineering, and we find jobs that require that level of skill > because we enjoy it. Those employers expect us to be mucking with code to > make things smoother or more efficient. Some of us come from more of a > business background and prefer to manage the vendor relationships to get > satisfaction, and our employers expect us to be on the phone with those > vendors or with the (usually outsourced) help desk dealing with things > like reporting and commercial management/deployment tools. Sysadmins This, I think, might be the biggest challenge of our organization. And, indeed, may also be the reason we and others (even Wikipedia!) sometimes seem to be unable to agree on an adequately descriptive definition of a "System Administrator". These two different roles require very different skill sets. Yes, they probably do overlap...but I think the overlap is quite small. Yet, I think Michael, David, Brad, Atom and I would all agree that both are "system administrators". At the same time, I don't think you could take either type of system administrator and replace them with the other. There simply isn't sufficient overlap. I think it would be easier to take a mature Windows administrator and drop them into a *nix administration role, or take a mature *nix administrator and drop them into a Windows administration role. I'm guessing there would be a month, at most, of non-productive time. But replacing the "phone-slinging" admin with the "code-slinging" admin, or vice versa, would probably be six months or more. (If they last that long. I suspect either of them would hate being taken out of their "element" and look for an opportunity to get back.) (And I'm not using "code-slinging" or "phone-slinging" as negative labels...just looking for an easy way of differentiating the two in discussion.) These two types of system administrators, I imagine, would also be looking for very different things with regard to their professional development. So what do we do? Do we try to focus on the limited commonalities between the two types (although most of us probably lie somewhere between these two "poles", and have more overlap with each other)? Or do we organize our own "special interest" groups? Personally, I don't know. (I suspect this is the same issue that caused publications like SysAdmin to eventually be killed. I assume that as Microsoft's, Novell's and the OSS *nix's data center offerings on commodity hardware matured, and third-party hosting services became more common, it became more difficult to keep the same depth to the technical articles, while still appealing to this new, very broad audience.) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
