Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 108
ArbiterOne writes "The 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is today. Celebrated worldwide on the last Friday of July, this day honors those who fight in the digital trenches to keep the Net alive. OpenDNS offers a way to remind your boss about the holiday, while another blogger shares war stories. The startup Ksplice has created an homage to these heroes in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure." Reader Netbuzz submits a sobering look at the profession from Network World, which notes, "In the past year, [sysadmins'] pay has dropped, and more of their positions are being farmed out to temporary workers."
Somebody remembered... (Score:3, Informative)
Somebody must have been reading the intranet site at my company because this year people brought in food for the I.T. department. It's on the company event calendar. I'm stuffed. The food and appreciation makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
Re:Dear Sysadmin (Score:4, Informative)
Dear Anonymous Coward
You are about to be subjected to a rant.
System Administrators generally don't work for the IT department, at least not in the way you seem to think. The IT department is where you find the Windows support people, while the System Administrator is the one who fixes things when the IT department has messed up, and implements safeguards to make it harder for IT to mess up, and easier to clean up when they succeed in doing it anyhow.
To use a language you might understand, a System Administrator is to IT PC support like an accountant is to a payroll clerk.
And yes, it's very conceivable that a small company can do without a sysadmin on the payroll. Just like they can do without an accountant on the payroll. The services can be purchased outside the company when needed.
But when the brown stuff hits the revolving blades, you may be glad you have them.
System Administrator Appreciation Day is about letting them know you appreciate all the times they have kept the faeces away from the chopping action, without you even noticing.
The better the sysadmin is, the lazier and more overpaid you think he is, because his success can be measured in all the bad things that doesn't happen. When your network didn't go down while your suit buddy's network did, you get upset with the sysadmin because e-mails to your buddy bounce while your buddy's network is down. You don't appreciate him for your network being up, despite all the things you and your suit friends have done to bring it down, including (but not limited to) surfing teen pr0n from your overpriced notebook while at a hotel room, bringing infected USB keys from home, "bringing" a printer home because you thought nobody used it (in reality, it would print out ALERTS, which thankfully weren't that often), or buying inadequate and overpriced hardware to scratch the back of your suit buddies at the nineteenth hole, blatantly ignorant of the problems interfacing yellow crap to brown crap. No, you leave that problem to the IT department, who can't tell crap from their own shoes (with good reason). So when the sysadmin fixes things to at least working conditions, you get upset because he isn't productive, and doesn't give you a big smile.
Dear Anonymous Coward, if you took the time to look things over, you might be astonished to find that the company does better when you are on vacation than it does when the sysadmin is. Perhaps you aren't as indispensable as you think?