On Fri, 28 Jan 2011, Aaron McCaleb wrote:
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.)
I want to emphasise that the lack of replacabilty is not saying that you
are taking a phone-slinging windows admin and trying to put them in a
code-slinging unix adminpostition, but if you take a code-slinging RedHat
admin and try to put them into an organization that really wants a
phone-slinging RedHat admin, everyone is going to be very unhappy for a
long while (if things ever work out)
and both people and organizations morph over time, in both directions.
(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.)
I think they do a wonderful job of capturing the essesence of the
different ends of the spectrum, as long as nobody takes offense to them
they are great.
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 don't either, but I think it's a very good thing to identify this
divide, if for no other reason than it makes it possible to target
individual projects at each type. That doesn't mean that LOPSA can't have
both types, and provide functions and projects that benfit both, but
rather that it's highly likely that any one service or project will
probably work far better for one than for the other, and there is not a
whole lot that will really work well for both ends of the spectrum.
(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.)
I think the worst thing that can be done is to try to appeal to everyone
at the same time. this doesn't mean that one issue of the magazine can't
have different articles targeted at both, but it does mean that when you
do that, neither group gets the full value of the magazine, so if you
don't pick up enough new subscribers from adding the phone-slinging
articles to make up for the decreased value you are provideing to the
code-slinging people, you end up loosing out.
David Lang
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