On 2013-01-15 at 11:08 -0500, John BORIS wrote: > better part of an evening or weekend day. I do make them sit there with > me when I end up fixing their prob;em so they can see how tedious it can > be at times.
You've hit on the core of the issue with friends-and-family versus volunteering. A lot of the F&F stuff is things that folks could do themselves, but it's tedious and they've put it off and now they need to recover and they want someone else to do the slog-work. There's a difference between "unpaid work for F&F" and "pro bono work for the betterment of broader society". It's noteworthy that the given examples of professions that do a lot of pro bono work are professions which are highly paid enough that people can routinely be expected to afford to give some amount of their time for pro bono. System administration, at the "pure sysadmin" level, tends to not be so highly rewarded, and I'd hesitate to impose such demands as part of professional society membership. That said, as you move up into six-figure salaries as a sysadmin, you typically can afford to do pro bono work, even in Silicon Valley. There are multiple approaches though. Open source project work does seem to me to count, since without high-quality software which is easy to run in production, costs of charities, etc, go up. If every charity had to run their infrastructure on Windows Server with Exchange, their overheads would soar, compared to places that have a Debian box running Exim and Dovecot and someone who comes in once a month to check things are going okay, handle training, etc. -Phil _______________________________________________ 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/
