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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 27, 2007 12:01 PM
from the thanks-for-the-hard-work dept.
from the thanks-for-the-hard-work dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today is the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. It is always the last Friday in July and is the one day that SysAdmins are supposed to get the respect they deserve to be getting the other 364 days of the year. Today is the day that we wish everyone would considering the daunting tasks, small budgets, and ridiculous timelines that many SysAdmins face all year. Please thank them for everything they do for you and for your business. If you think you have a great SysAdmin today would be the day to nominate them for SysAdmin of the Year. 'The idea for System Administrator Day was inspired by a print ad for a Hewlett-Packard laser jet printer. The ad showed lines of employees bringing gifts for the IT guy who made the purchase. System Administrator Appreciation Day has, over the years, garnered support from many organizations."
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Ask Slashdot: Are Sysadmins Really that Bad? 273 comments
tgbrittai asks: "According to Paul Boutin they are merely an obstacle to be manipulated or outmaneuvered. According to Steve Wozniak they are pimps. I've known my share of good and bad sysadmins, programmers and every other professional role out there, and I have to wonder: are sysadmins really THAT bad?"
Most times sys-admins are overworked and underpaid and have to deal with users who take advantage of their local IT person, tasking them to fix systems that they callously break. Others are truly worth the name "Bastard Operators from Hell". How would you rate your sys-admin and what things did you have to do to make things run smoothly (or not)?
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I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do System Administrators get a day? Why not Database Administrators? Why not Systems Architects? Why not Software Developers? All of these people are needed just as much as any of the others to achieve success.
System Administrators must be much different at other companies because I haven't met one that I've particularly thought deserves a whole freaking day devoted to celebrating them.
Flamebait, I know
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Funny)
That does seem appropriate, I vote for "geek apprciation day". Shoot, we all deserve it -- now if you'll excuse me, I have to go clean up some luser's mess. Funny how it feels like just another day...
Parent
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course I also view Sys Admins as anyone who is responsible for the system, essentially a support staff for the people that actually do the work. The web dev and DBA at my current job actually handle everything that people touch via a front end or see on the web, my job is to make sure they can get things done.
Parent
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Informative)
My position is not officially "sys-admin" but I support hundreds of them with my companies backup product and am constantly on remote connections rebuilding servers, diagnosing systems, and personally feel the pain not only of one shop's system troubles, but can attest to the fact that sys admins all over the country have some of the most thankless jobs going. I work 60 hours every week, am wakened frequently from sleep, and spend hours on conference calls with panicking customers, resellers, and site managers.
I barely stay sane in my position, and I don't have budget issues or roll-out deadlines. I don't know how you guys do it. I did it years ago when things were simpler and even then it was a suck job. I've also been a programmer before and can definitively say that even under production deadlines, and the stress of problem solving and code testing, being a coder is a hell of a lot easier than being an admin. It also takes (typically) requires less frequent training on new systems and processes (once you know C++ you're good for 10 years), and programming PAYS BETTER. So any of you coders that bitch about how cushy our job is, I say to you, YOU TRY IT! Being a sys admin sucks almost as working for a city government, and yet hundreds of admins I know DO work for cities, ouch.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, and don't let that 3 a.m. call/drive to work stop you from coming back in bright and early!
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been in the field ten years and all of the developers respect me and have my respect. During a major project, the entire dev team got a big award/bonus, and the lead went to corporate and said he'd not accept this award/bonus unless I was included. Although not part of the dev team, he claimed I was indispensable in the completion of the project. Personally I didn't want it because I didn't think I contributed too much, no midnight calls or usual craziness with a hectic project. Our devs are stellar, they built a great system and only needed help where the abstraction of the programming language was too far out and they needed to do some server side scripting (crons, cmds, etc).
That said all of the sysadmins I have worked with have had great relations with the devs. I've personally never seen this rivalry in person and wonder if it's either died down, made bigger than it really is or so forth. We all work as teams to common goals, we don't sit there and bicker over bullshit.
They respect that I will be the one who has to answer the phone in the middle of the night, deal with hack attemps (or successes if their code isn't up to snuff) and so forth. I respect that they are the ones that have to deliver to the customer a working system. We work together to get there . . .
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Funny)
"What was your username again?"
> I Choose Not to Participate (Score: 5, Doomed) by eldavojohn (898314)
Ah, there's your username.
*clickity-click*
rm -rf /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn/hello.jpg
mkdir
wget http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg [goatse.cx] >
chown eldavojohn hello.jpg
"Hello, Human Resources? There's something about one of your employees that you need to know about..."
Parent
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Informative)
rm -rf /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn/hello.jpg
mkdir
wget http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg [goatse.cx] >
chown eldavojohn hello.jpg
"Hello, Human Resources? There's something about one of your employees that you need to know about..."
you should try this:
wget -O http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg [goatse.cx] > hello.jpg
Parent
Heh - missed something else too: (Score:5, Funny)
rm -rf /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn /usr/staff/eldavojohn/hello.jpg
mkdir
wget http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg [goatse.cx] >
chown eldavojohn hello.jpg
"Hello, Human Resources? There's something about one of your employees that you need to know about..."
I mean, cripes, can we at least avoid tempting fate @ the server by not mucking around in /usr here?
Here... I'll fix it for 'im:
mkdir -p /home/eldavojohn/\!special
cd /home/eldavojohn
wget -m -nH http://barnyardlovers.com/pix/?N=D [barnyardlovers.com] && chown -R eldavojohn:users /home/eldavojohn/\!special
echo "Dear Barnyard Lovers \n I'm having trouble renewing my subscription for next year. Please reply and tell me how I can change my credit card info. \n Thank you,\n eldavojohn" | mail -s "subscription renewal trouble, plz help" HR_Droid@company.com
I mean, sheesh...
(okay, okay - I'll go back to work now...)
Parent
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you be petty and vindictive? You have a small amount of power in an artificial system, lose the god complex. If you were to do anything like this you'd more than likely be fired anyways and go back to being your normal self.
Any time I've been tasked as a sysadmin I've made it a point to treat all my users with respect and take the extra moment to explain things if it seemed like the user wanted to know a little more. Those actions gained me real respect and power.
If you want appreciation as a sysadmin start treating the users that you administer with more respect and make sure that their needs are taken care of before they have to ask. If you have a good relationship with your users you'll hear from them regarding things other than problems... like maybe an invite to the bar, or coffee in the morning.
Having a specific day to "appreciate" anything is stupid, if you do a good job and treat people well you will be appreciated every day.
Parent
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Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Insightful)
Even at the upper levels, there is always some moron who makes it through your minions to bother you when you don't need to be bothered.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As the entire IT department for a small/medium business, even a general "IT Appreciation Day" would be nice.
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Insightful)
For all of the people who are so adamantly opposed to _any_ sort of "day" for technology professionals...meh. People have birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, etc, and they are all commemorated in some fashion. I think of SAAD as a good occasion to relax for a day and enjoy things. For the rest of the work year, we will all be trudging about dealing with problems, what is the big objection with having ONE day out of the year where we recognize our achievements even if no-one else does. It is a way of building esprit du corps and good feelings across departments.
(as an aside)
So many frackin' people (I find this especially true in the US) are so hell-bent on being unhappy these days. They want to piss in everyone's Cheerios because they can't be happy...why should anyone ELSE be happy? The last I heard, we all have a time-limit on our existence on this planet, why would you want to spend it being frackin' unhappy? Relax a little people! Loosen that knot around your neck and enjoy just being alive for a moment.
*sheesh*
PONA
Parent
cmdrTaco, CowboyNeal, Zonk, et all (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, with a good sysadmin, all the other stuff can be managed to some degree.. just not as pretty. unless you share admin aesthetics.
Wearing the admin hat is easy, wearing it well is a total pain in the rear.
Noticing a master is the trick
Anyway, thank you slashdot admins for a rock solid site.
Storm
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice to see the trolls out in force.
Sysadmin is a pretty general term these days, but I fall into that category on a number of critical systems. It means that I perform maintenance, upgrades, patches. Means I check the logs on a daily basis, run down obscure errors. I do backup restores, to make sure the guy who is in charge of the backups is doing his job correctly.
If nothing ever goes wrong, then no one knows I exist. Something explodes, and I work Friday night to Monday at 2:00am getting everything back up, and no one even knows that there was a problem on Monday. Then I go on vacation, and something breaks and they call support, and support fixes it and bills them 25,000 dollars because they decided "per incident" support was enough for anyone, and the support guys take a day to fix a problem I could fix in an hour.
So yea, I love it when people who are completely helpless when my systems go down tell me I don't do anything special. I love sitting around at the company meetings where some jerkoff who made 10,000 dollars over his sales goal gets employee of the month, while my jury-rigged failover backup that I put together out of spare parts, which kept the whole company running for 5 days, goes completely unrecognized.
If it weren't for people like me, you'd be using a typewriter and a can phone [indiana.edu].
Parent
Feedin the troll.s (Score:3, Insightful)
The real truth of it is that all the things that are produced by all those different people do not play well together, and that a person who can take poorly documented, often poorly written, pieces of code, often with conflicting system requirements, and make them live together happily in the same environment is far more valuable than a prima donna who always i
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, you can find assholes in any profession. If your sysadmins are dickheads, you need to let HR know about it and find some new ones because there are a lot of good ones out there who love the job, like to help people, and have tons of knowledge and experience to share.
Now let's all hug.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
SysAdmin Appreciation Day is a way for ThinkGeek.com to boost their sales for the year. I'm willing to bet that the summer months are a slump for them, as is the same for most retailers. Nov-Jan is christmas, Feb is valentines... after that the retail buying frenzy is back down to normal levels. This is non-holiday is always in July.
Hallmark does the same thing... I live in Michigan and we have "Sweetest Day" in September (or October, ca
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's right, you don't. But only because they get an entire week.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the US there are all sorts of official days and weeks for various professions. Until recently I worked as a "sysadmin" at a small hospital. They celebrated just about every "professionals holiday" you can imagine.
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Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is why we need a day to remind people to be nice to sysadmins... Lose the god complex and folks will respect you *every* day.
Parent
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I Choose Not to Participate (Score:5, Insightful)
When I'm working late, and the janitor comes in to my cube to empty my trash, I turn around and say, "Thank you," because he's working late, doing a job that nobody else wants to do, and making sure I can get my job done without having to waste time taking out the trash.
Learn to have a little appreciation for the people who do the things you don't want to do for yourself, eh?
Parent
Another one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Another one? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. I call mine Pay Day. It comes 26 times a year.
Parent
No problem. (Score:5, Funny)
oxymoron (Score:5, Funny)
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the point of these artificial job-appreciation-days? If someone appreciates me or my work, I would prefer to hear it when they feel like it rather than get a mug or something lame (not that I ever have, no one is aware of this momentous day anywhere I've ever worked, thank god!). Whatever happened to honest sentiment?
10 simple rules to show your appreciation (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Fix your printer yourself.
3. If you get the message "Critical System Updates Available", don't ignore it. Take the updates.
4. Don't get your laptop stolen.
5. Use sudo, not root.
6. If it was working yesterday, something changed. Fess up.
7. Check to make sure its plugged in.
8. RTFM
9. Don't open that
10. If its 4:55 pm, let it go. It can wait until Monday.
Full disclosure - I work for Hyperic, http://www.hyperic.com/ [hyperic.com], and submitted this story which got beat by the one you are now reading... it was in a blog post Javier Soltero made this morning: http://www.hyperic.com/blog/hyperic/2007/07/27/ha
Just a fun conversation about all the stupid things admins have to put up with from their users. I know there's more out there!!! Bring it on
Re:10 simple rules to show your appreciation (Score:5, Funny)
7.a. plug it back in
7.b. stop fucking unplugging it
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Send them an eCard! (Score:2)
Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day [informationweek.com].
if the internet is a series of tubes (Score:5, Funny)
so as long as you guys can keep your asscrack hidden as you do your work, then you can have your own day
...and, so? (Score:3, Insightful)
And what's with the cheesy HP plug? (Does anyone still really buy HP printers?)
Oh, and remember: next Friday... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd like to (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
This is such a stupid celebration. Like anyone has ever seen a Happy System Administrator.
Oh, wait. I see how you meant that. Uhhh... Happy Sys Admin day to you too. (Ah crap - there goes my beeper.) DAMMIT!
Appreciation? (Score:4, Funny)
Free lunch :) (Score:3, Interesting)
Why SysAdmins tend to be underappreciated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it kind of funny that I have been paid for my services just to help design an expansion plan for a network and IT department and pitch it to the suits. The reason I was called in was because they wouldn't just listen to their IT staff, so we wo