I think you're conflating ambition and.... I don't want to use a term as strong as disloyalty, but something along those lines.
I'm not sure that being ambitious necessarily means that you're going to leave as soon as you see the opportunity for a 5% pay increase. There are a lot of opportunities for the ambitious to advance outside of job hopping, and outside of the number of figures on your paycheck. I consider myself extremely driven and ambitious in the sense that I'm constantly working towards being better at what I do. The ability to do something interesting and to grow my knowledge and skillset means far more to me than a few extra dollars. As long as my job is meaningful and I have the opportunity to work on interesting and novel projects (as opposed to resetting passwords over and over for a year), then my ambition is directly internally, towards building and improving the company I'm currently with. I don't think there's anything wrong with an ambitious sysadmin, but maybe there is in the sense of the word that you're talking about. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Luke S. Crawford" <[email protected]> To: "LOPSA Discuss List" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, 3 May, 2012 2:40:56 PM Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Do Sysadmins have a half-life? On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 09:17:01PM -0700, Atom Powers wrote: > >From one point of view, most people will be average and tend toward > mediocrity. The short half-life of the industry will catch up to them > and many must learn to adapt. But from my point of view only the > people who make an effort to stand out, to be exceptional, really > matter. Most people tend towards being, well, average. No argument there. I mean, yeah, if you can get "the best" that's great; one of the best sysadmins is worth a thousand mediocre sysadmins (okay, I exaggerate.) It's silly, too; If you hire me, I'm not going to stick around forever; I'm going to leave as soon as it is advantageous for me to do so. That's what ambitious, confident people do. The problem is? you are selecting for ambition, not ability. I can't tell you how many times I've been promoted or chosen for a job over someone more competent and loyal because I'm confident and ambitious. As an employer, you are much better off with an employee that doesn't enjoy interviewing and is happy with their position. Don't give them a reason to look around and they won't. But the thing is, ambition has zero correlation with competence. >From what I've seen, success requires a great deal of ambition, but also the willingness to redirect that ambition in to an area where you are competent. (well, and having an area where you are competent) But, just sayin' - when you hire a SysAdmin? competence is pretty important. I fail to see how ambition helps you (I mean, helps the employer) at all, and hiring an ambitious SysAdmin? it certainly does mean that you will have to hire and train a new SysAdmin sooner than you would have otherwise. Ambitious people move more often; even if employers didn't give us preferential treatment during the interview (and employers generally do) we move more often because yeah, if we can get a 20% bump in pay, or a job that lets us do something we are more interested in? we take it. And we actively look for those opportunities. _______________________________________________ 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/
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