Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Systems Administration experience

We've been having a lot of arguments with our human resources types about what exactly constitutes a good systems administrator and how we identify one from a CV.

Everyone who is a systems administrator knows how to spot one from a mile away. How do we do that? It's definitely got nothing to do with whether they have a degree or any other piece of paper with their name on it. It's got a lot more to do with how their brain works.

After a lot of effort, we've got the HR people to see that it's quality of experience not quantity that's important; that someone straight out of school who's be hacking around with *nix for a while is better than someone with a three year degree and three years of MSIE type experience. We're stuck with one niggling concern, however.

For some reason (to do with job gradings) it is important that we quantify the amount of time would take someone to learn to be a systems administrator. This is where I need some help ...

Assume that you're straight out of high school and you've never touched a computer in your life (bar perhaps the BA like things of writing letters to your gran and sending the occasional e-mail) *Hi Siv*. How long before you're competent to get root on a multi-user machine -- take RUCUS as an example: 500 user FreeBSD box? How long before you're competent to get root on several multi-user machines running business-critical functions on a variety of operating systems for an institution with 8000+ users?

It took my mind a while to get around that. I don't really know the answer. I do know where I might be making a mistake though. All my answers have been based on the incredibly intelligent people I know who've picked things up more quickly than the average CS/IS type person might. It's typical of most sysadmin -- the nature of the job requires that you learn very fast. I thinking I'm doing the incumbent an injustice here ... I think the answer the HR people are looking for is how long will it take a normal person with computer tendencies to gain these skills?

If you have any ideas on what the answer might be please let me know :-)

posted by guy at: 12:51 SAST | path: /issues | permanent link

Friday, July 30, 2004

SysAdmin Appreciation Day

Did you feel appreciated today? I sort of did. I got chocolate (thanks David et al), and people generally left me alone. Apart from that it was business as usual in the zoo.

I had a weird no-advance-notice visit by some people from Uni Lesotho. They came to find out how Rhodes' IT division worked -- how we handled support issues, what software we used, etc. It was sort of interesting to find out something about other institutions too. It would have been more interesting if I wasn't in the middle of upgrading a web server at the time.

It was probably appropriate that about 3pm I cut 110 odd people off the network. They're the ones still vulnerable to the LSASS exploiting viruses that are doing the rounds, and they'd had three days warning of their imminent disconnection. We started getting e-mails within ten minutes promising that machines had now been patched -- "please reconnect me, I need to work over the weekend". They're still sitting in the ticketing queue ... I guess there is a bit of BOFH lurking in me somewhere. There are public labs they can use.

True to form, we knocked off a bit early, as we do every month, and headed down to the local pub to have a few beers and talk shop. The usual crowd were there and we had a reasonably interesting discussion about the state of wireless in Grahamstown. I guess a cold one was a fitting end to sysadmin appreciation day :)

posted by guy at: 19:17 SAST | path: /general | permanent link