Off the top of my head... 1. A senior person understands the internal workings of the systems he/she administers and debugs issues from a place of science, not guessing.
2. A senior person has enough experience to know a problem's solution because he or she has seen and fixed it before, but is smart enough to check the assumption to make sure it really is true. 3. A senior person automates their way out of problems rather than "working harder". They automate themselves out of a job constantly so they can be re-assigned to more interesting projects. But most importantly... A senior person demonstrates technical leadership by creating the processes that other people can follow, thereby enabling delegation and multiplying their effectiveness. Maybe the senior person is the only one technical enough to work out the procedure for replacing a bad disk on a server, but they document it in a way that less experience people can do the task. Maybe the senior person is the only one technical enough to set up a massive monitoring system, but they document how to add new devices so that everyone can add to what is monitored. Therefore they multiply their effectiveness because they use their knowledge not to do work, but to make it possible that an army of people can do the work instead. Good documentation is the first step to automating a process, so by working out the process, they start the "guess work -> repeatable -> automated" life-cycle that repetitive tasks should follow. Tom _______________________________________________ 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/
