
30 years a sysadmin - jlg23
http://www.itworld.com/article/2987198/operating-systems/30-years-a-sysadmin.html
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AdmiralAsshat
_The Downside: ... Systems administrators are rarely customer-facing unless
you count as customers the staff that use the systems that you keep humming
along._

You consider this a downside? Customer-facing IT Support is an absolutely
nightmare. It's part of my job, and by far my _least favorite_ part of the
job, as the customer is more often an impediment to solving their problem than
an asset.

~~~
irishloop
The way I read it, the author was saying that it is a problem of recognition:
Because you are not customer-facing, you are more invisible in the system and
with it comes the lack of job satisfaction one may get from a pat on the back
of a job well done via the customer interaction.

Certainly it' s a double-edged sword but that's how I read it at least.

~~~
bitJericho
I dunno. The staff when I did internal customer IT treated me like royalty. It
helped that I could solve just about anything within minutes rather than hours
like the previous guy. It also helped that I enjoyed learning the ins and outs
of the software they used. Most of the IT staff did not like to RTFM. But
that's IT. It's probably much different for sysadmins though I did a bit of
that too.

------
Ologn
I worked as a Unix systems administrator 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years
ago, 5 years ago.

20 years ago, in 1995, a tech startup would usually have the programmers do
the systems administration, until about four programmers or so had been hired
- by then the code would be in shape to put on the Java application server,
traffic was picking up, and they needed someone to deal with it full-time, who
knew what they were doing. The servers would often be on-site, on the
company's T-1 line, or sometimes would be at a colocation facility.

Nowadays, how many people are hired at a tech startup before they hire someone
to deal with installing Red Hat on HP rack servers? It can be a while -
nowadays if you need 500 servers quickly, and have the money, you can spin
them up (and down) on EC2 in a few minutes. Plus there's Linode, Rackspace,
Ramnode - I have a personal VPS on each of them. Why not? It's only $10-$20 a
month each. It's hard to justify the cost of hiring a sysadmin, a backup
person to the sysadmin, pay for colo space, leasing a server etc., when you
can get a pretty nice Linode VPS for $10 a month.

~~~
otterley
> It's hard to justify the cost of hiring a sysadmin, a backup person to the
> sysadmin, pay for colo space, leasing a server etc., when you can get a
> pretty nice Linode VPS for $10 a month.

Once you have hundreds or thousands of instances, especially ones with
reasonable amounts of resources, the sticker shock starts to make owning and
hosting your own servers look pretty tantalizing.

------
rashkov
There's a lot to like about IT, but I found plenty to be frustrated about as
well.

I spent four years with an IT consultancy piecing together 40 hours working
for clients who didn't need a full time IT department. Not having enough hours
to transform their operations, running around the city putting out fires, and
dealing with old hardware was a bit miserable. Looking around the job market
showed a lot more of the same, along with a few high-stress and non-
specialized positions working for financial or legal companies. Maybe that's
just the scene in New York, I don't know, but the dream of being a company
neckbeard did not pan out.

Reading slashdot in the 90s made IT sound amazing, but I've found that geek
dream much easier to fulfill in the software industry.

------
dschiptsov
Usual bullshit.

The job of sysadmin is to recognize how systems have been designed, based on
which first principles and what are the alternatives. This is how one ends up
with Postgres instead MySQL (or Informix instead of Oracle) with Scala instead
of Ruby (because you do understand principles Scala is based upon), with
Erlang instead of Java (you do understand the differences and principles),etc.
Basically, sysadmin is a system (or service) designer and architect.

Nowadays the term sysadmin is used to describe a job of issuing memorized
commands to AWS or some "containers" without any deep understanding of what
dynamic linking is, what is libraries and API visioning, how to compile from
sources and run several versions of some sets of libs, how to recompile a
source package disabling unnecessary features, and so on. This is the same
nonsense as to call an auto-mechanic an engineer. Most of moderns sysadmins
does not know what the _. /configure; make; make install_ sequence or a syntax
of Makefiles or how the mess they called cmake works. (how many here knows how
to write RPM's spec?))

Old school sysadmins are engineers, not mechanics. They do understand access
patterns, data-structures, memory allocation techniques, what are shortcomings
of posix threads and its naive usage, and, of course, programming paradigms,
so they could reason (more objectively than managers or other laymen) about
behavior of a system.

They think that running a Hadoop on AWS (from ready images) is a big deal.

btw, in my 20 years of being sysadmin (since SCO Open Server and FreeBSD 2.0)
everything worked.

~~~
blantonl
Your description of a sysadmin sounds much more like the role of an architect.

btw, in my 23 years of being a help desk tech, sysadmin, architect,
consultant, manager, and finally owner of my own business, nothing has ever
just worked.

------
davidgerard
The great thing about sysadmin as a job: even in the future, nothing works!

------
pstuart
Kind of funny picture for the tape backup -- that's a stereo recorder, not a
data backup device.

~~~
hga
Young whippersnappers. I actually had one of those TEAC reel to reel tape
drives, maybe not that exact model---I don't remember it being able to auto-
reverse, but I wouldn't have cared about that---but otherwise the same
controls. It was a good device for its time, as were the reel to reel 7- and
9-track _computer_ tape drives I used later and concurrently:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape)

(7 track was the standard for 36 bit PDP-10s, 6 bits of data and one of
parity, and some earlier IBM machines as well.)

~~~
thwarted
From that wikipedia article:

 _The above describes a typical transport system; however, manufacturers
engineered many alternative designs. For example, some designs used a
horizontal transport deck where the operator simply set the tape reel in the
supply reel bay, closed the door and pressed the load button, then a vacuum
system would draw the tape along the path and onto a take-up hub within the
mechanism._

Back in the day, I used a 9-track tape drive like this. It was quite the thing
to watch it mount the tape. A while ago I found a video of it[0].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS9QtC7FYiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS9QtC7FYiE)

~~~
mrpippy
Ah the HP 88780, my cubicle-mate for a summer job 15 years ago

