On 10/16/13 11:29 AM, "Atom Powers" <[email protected]> wrote:
>I feel that this topic has been discussed before, at length, but I >don't recall where... Most anywhere there are discussions about SA work - certainly in USENIX/LISA/LOPSA forums... >Most of the things I value in an SA are talents: curiosity, analytic >thinking, patience, and a healthy paranoia. > >Skills and Knowledge are very domain specific. A MS Windows admin will >have different skills than a Linux admin which is different than a >network admin, etc. > >There are some broad skills that might be trainable: troubleshooting, >designing for scale, "Getting Things Done", security principles, >business principles, and knowledge of various standards such as those >around TCP, share libraries, etc. I'd agree with that list pretty much. For exactly the reason that we roll our eyes at job postings asking for very explicit version knowledge - only acceptable in the "we have this old version and our SA fell under a bus" scenario (and possibly not even then), releases of 'stuff' in our business are so transient that the most important skills are those that facilitate problem determination and working out what's going on, how things work etc. If you want specific concepts, I'd consider packaging and installation models on various operating systems and how to look for stuff - who hasn't been presented with a package to install with exquisitely obscure code (possibly a binary) that scatters things hither and yon across your previously pristine machine. If you're lucky there's a log file... Perhaps a historical segment that looks back over varying OS's, not in gross detail but comparing/contrasting how different vendors have treated different common concepts. Terminology is huge; What is a folder ? a catalog ? a directory ? a link ? a process ? a job ? ... to IBM, to UNISYS, to VMS, Windows, Linux, BSD... so often there are disastrous problems caused by assumptions on terminology when folks aren't using the same rosetta stone. I guess this is about being able to think in 'concepts' rather than just 'implementations'. The short answer to the question for me is - I want the graduate to actually have a toolkit they can use in their metaphorical back pocket which includes how to read documentation when it exists and how to work out what's going on when it doesn't (or it lies). FWIW Tim -- Tim Kirby [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
