Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler The irony of the Sysadmin

I have been an IT pro for 12 years now. In that time I have had exactly 2 managers/bosses that understand the irony of my position: When I'm sitting here posting to forums or catching up on my geek news I am doing my job very well. My productivity metric is based almost solely on uptime/system availability. When you have your systems tuned super tight you have more unobstructed time to finish projects. When your projects are complete you then can divide your time between the internet and studying up for that next test or catching up on the latest tech trends or looking for that new tech that will make things even more efficient. That is the beauty of a small company like this. Just big enough to have a 2-member IT staff and use alot of enterprise toys but not so big that you have management layers who each have their own way of measuring productivity. At Intel it was all peer review and "team player" and such, which was fine because everone in my was happy with me and further enjoyed the fact that I would sign on to any project of theirs that caught my interest. My first job was a call center where it was all "tickets," or calls handled. I also worked at an insurance company for a short time where the IS manager would just flip out if you sat for more that 5 minutes a day. We used to go unplug things just to make another admin go figure out what was wrong and "justify his position." Stupid way of doing things.

I understand EXACTLY what you are saying! Such is the plight of a systems admin! It is especially ironic when the management would not look kindly on an admin 'browsing' the internet 'pointlessly' with apparently 'nothing' to do, when the truth remains that 'nothing' to do actually means the guy has done his job in the first place! IF the systems administrators are being paid 'more', it would be only to compensate for the stomach ulcers, loss of sleep, hair, sanity and social life that they would have to undergo. But I guess being a systems admin. would be a sure-fire ticket to heaven, unless ofcourse you kill the guy who blames the systems admin for his number-key not working without the 'Num Lock' turned on!

Exactly. My boss here is VP-Engineering and knows the game. Pretty cool.

BTW- The Elephant lives! Rescued from the demented clutches of MSJ!

Yup he does! BTW, was just wondering, what prompted you to start this topic???

Heehee. On top of the fact that our systems are "nominal" as alway we are slowing way down for the holidays. I think my boss dropping by my office and chuckling at the sight of me staring blank-eyed at my screen and drooling on my desk caused me to ruminate about my position here.

Ah ok! It's a blessing for a sys. admin to get an understanding/appreciative boss! I'm sure not all sys. admins would have such a docile reaction as yours when they ruminate on their positions(predicaments?!).

You are the modern day maintenance man sit around and wait for stuff to break. lol

Maytag Sam, that's who I am! No really we spend a lot of time working on ways to make our jobs easier. That's the beauty of computers. You can whip up a web app or script or little C program to tell you what you need to know or automate the mundane tasks. The one thing I can't change is the, um, competency of the general users. Try and try again it is just futile. Which brings up Einstein't remark about insane behaviour.