A soliloquy for sysadmins

Marie Staver
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read
This really says it all.

It’s Systems Administrator Day today, if you didn’t know! Go thank a sysadmin!

NO REALLY, DROP EVERYTHING AND GO DO THAT RIGHT NOW. Because without systems administrators, I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it, plain and simple.

In fact, NONE of your favorite websites or online software would be running right now without them.

Sysadmins are the Internet’s “people in the engine room”. These people fix, they upgrade, they install, and they leap out of bed at 3am and work a double shift on their day off because if they don’t, we’re all going down.

They’re also chronically under-appreciated, including by upper *and* lower management, and their own coworkers (I’m looking at you, coders). It’s a tough job that often gets treated as an annoyance by corporate, and blamed for everything wrong by everyone else. And trust me when I say that about 364 days a year, nobody says thank you, meaningfully, for all the heroic, difficult and critical work that goes on.

But let’s talk about DevOps

And if you’re thinking, “Well, not every company has a dedicated sysadmin; lots of people are just ‘doing sysadmin work’ while also coding or something,” then realize that that’s just proof of how crazily undervalued this work is, when almost no tech company or product could survive without it. When someone says to me “our X developer does the sysadmin stuff too”, I hear, “I don’t have a pit mechanic for my Formula 1 car; the engineer who designed and built it just runs out there and checks on it once in a while.” I am a tech professional with more than ten years experience, and as a result, I would never work for a company of any non-two-guys-in-a-garage size that didn’t dedicate some resources to systems administration — I’ve done it and those people are insane.

“DevOps”, which seemed at first like an exciting managerial path to increasing the understanding and visibility and integratedness of systems admin work, has quickly become yet another excuse to shrug sysadmins off as janitors — this time, by pretending that the developers can just go ahead and do systems administration too, like it’s as simple as everyone sweeping the bathroom once a week — who needs a sysadmin department at all? This is the most infuriating stupidity in my whole professional life, and companies who do it are doomy doom DOOMED, mark my words. Sysadmins and developers have diametrically-opposed goals in their daily work, and due to the pressure of profit-centers, sysadmin tasks will always wind up in the “later/never” bin if they’re competing with development tasks for an engineer’s time (and that’s even assuming said engineer CAN do both jobs, which close to zero that I’ve ever met can — they’re not the same skillset). DevOps was a promising organizational development (I thought) when it was driven by techs and tech managers, but hoo boy did the boardroom cerebus get its teeth into it, and now it’s just one more way to try to look like you’re saving money by cutting the company’s Achilles’ tendon.

But enough about that: They’re just lovely people

(Disclaimer: I have a million sysadmin friends and am dating one, soooo I may be biased. But it’s a good bias, and today I’m letting it out. ;)

I’ve met a range of sysadmin personalities from Futurama Scruffy to Cowboy Bebop Ed, but every single good sysadmin I’ve known has been a stellar human being. Working in critical systems takes a mixture of self-awareness, humor, and knight-in-shining-armor willingness to help poor idiots in desperate situations that I just could not admire more. I got into this field out of love for the systems, like most of us I think; but I’ve stayed for love of the people — and I don’t mean the other managers, belieeeeve me. I mean “you guys”, the motley few with all the skills and none of the time for bullshit. You’re amazing, and I wish I could do more to help.

But, no matter where I work or what I do, I promise I’ll find the folks manning the engine room and buy them a beer-or-whatever, maybe on Sysadmin Day and maybe not, but as often as I can because holy cow, thank you!

Marie Staver

Written by

yet another monkey with a typewriter and too-vivid dreams

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