Nine Traits of the Veteran Network Admin

snydeq writes "Born or made, network admins share certain defining characteristics. Deep End's Paul Venezia offers nine: 'I hope that this insight into the extremely logical, yet consistently dangerous world of the network admin has shed some light on how we work and how we think. I don't expect it to curtail the repeated claims of the network being down, but maybe it's a start. In fact, if you're reading this and you are not a network admin, perhaps you should find the closest one and buy him or her a cup of coffee. They could probably use it.'"

Two traits : Cooperative and uncooperative

[EmperorOfCanada]

Cooperative and uncooperative are the two primary traits of network admins. Seeing that most network admins are ignored when everything is going well and cursed when things are going badly it quickly becomes obvious to most network admins that saying no to most requests becomes a survival trait. But this often means that a network admin starts actively interfering with the actual business (unless the business is network administration)

So take your average non IT company. The sales people want to switch from Blackberries to iPhones and Androids. The network admin has 4 certifications from RIM and recently set up a huge Blackberry server. Plus this particular admin hates all things touch screen. The usual scenario will be that the admin will pull out 9 whitepapers showing just how secure Blackberry is as compared to iOS and Android. Using techno babble he will explain how hackers will be running the company in under a week. The salesman on the otherhand say that they look like tools from the 90s with their blackberries. The network admin wins the battle but then he starts to get nervous as he notices traffic on his BB server is nearly zero. A quick investigation shows that nearly every Blackberry sits in a drawer and the Salesman have gone out and bought their own phones and swapped the SIM cards. The network admin sends out a memo saying this is against corporate policy which is ignored. His attempts to get a salesman fired(to set an example) for violating security fail. He then notices nearly everyone is using gmail instead of his highly secure MailMaster2000. Then sends out a memo indicating that this is against corporate policy. He then implements a 30 day mandatory password rotation. Internal file server traffic nearly drops to zero because everyone switched to dropbox. He then sends out a memo that dropbox is against corporate policy. He then starts blocking sites such as reddit and he notices that network traffic drops to nearly zero. But walking by a sales person's office he notices that they are on reddit. So he investigates and finds out the entire sales team has bought mobile data plans. He then sends out a memo saying that private data plans are against corporate policy.

Then he comes to work only to find a contractor in his office. The contractor is there to "rationalize" IT seeing that after the IT guy insisted that all apps be developed for BB first the sales people have gone out on their own and developed 3 smartphone applications that have increased sales by 80% and that promotions via Reddit have sent corporate website visits through the roof. The company now works with clients via dropbox much more successfully than with the sftp system that merely served to confuse before. With mobile dataplans the salesforce has become much more effective.

Now the IT guy is left filling out a resume where his two best features are many Novell certifications and many Blackberry certifications.

IT people shouldn't cave into every whim of the week but I have seen so many that are stuck in the thinking of whatever year they became head of IT. IT is just one tiny department in so many companies yet I have seen IT somehow be able to treat senior managers of other departments like children. Seeing that they aren't children they often discover the virtues of outsourcing. The key benefit of outsourcing being that if the people they outsource to try pulling any crap they can be dropped in a second.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I can say if someone came in for an interview with this type of an attitude, I would tell them to pound sand.

I'm a network admin; not all of us act like tools like that. If your network admins are getting calls that something is down, then you need to redefine your processes and stop giving out your direct line like a toolbag and instead have users contact the help desk.

I'd have called that article "9 traits of a crusty, worthless network admin". I'm seriously appalled someone even wrote that crap. :(

And FYI, when I interview people, the first thing I do is make sure they're willing to admit they may be at fault and they know how to Google something. I generally will give them a situation of misconfiguration on our part and ask how they communicate that to a user. Be honest. You're human, you screwed up, and apologize for the inconvenience. I generally also ask "how do you solve a problem you've not run into, and how do you answer someone that asks you a question you don't know the answer to right off hand?" I have too many people say they've ran into every problem and they know the answers. There's no shame in admitting you don't know something and you need to Google the answer (or look it up on Cisco's/Juniper's/VendorX's website).