In the message dated: Thu, 26 Feb 2015 18:34:43 -0800,
The pithy ruminations from David Lang on
<Re: [lopsa-discuss] What is a System Administrator> were:
=> On Thu, 26 Feb 2015, Chris Manly wrote:
=>
=>
=> A System Administrator is not building products that customers use. They put
I've disagreed with many statements in this thread, but this may be the
one where I take the strongest exception.
Within your environment, and your range of experience, your statement
may be accurate, but that doesn't make it correct.
The definition of "customer" varies as widely as the definition of
"product" or "system administrator" -- and we clearly can't agree on
any of those definitions.
As a single counter example, in my current $WORK, the 'customers'
are interal technical users of our HPC cluster, and the 'products'
they use include things like the HPC scheduler (open source, with the
kind of 'minor customizing' that you'd accept) to locally written tools
('products' designed, written, and maintained by sysadmins) to manage
computation jobs, manage internal documentation, manage software build
systems, manage storage, etc., etc..
In previous $WORK, the products our company sold to external customers
were things like: professional system administration services, change
managment systems, account management systems, configuration management
systems, performance and security monitoring systems, etc. Those were
largely written by -- GASP! -- system administrators.
=> together the systems to support the product, and may do things like build
mail
=> servers that the customers login to, but they aren't writing the code for
things
=> that are sold to customers (barring minor exceptions in customizing
opensource
=> code to work better as a part of what is being sold)
=>
=> In tiny companies, a person may wear many hats and be the Sales team and the
=> SysAdmin team and the Finance team (or the entire C*O team), but wearing the
=> SysAdmin hat, the job all revolves around making things work and keeping
them
=> working. If you are implementing new features that the users are going to
see
=> directly, it's probably not SysAdmin work.
I think what you're saying now is much closer to the way I see the scope
of SysAdmin work....a different proposition to me than the earlier statement.
In my experience, a huge portion of 'system administration' falls under the HR
category of "other duties as assigned". In many environments, those duties
include creating customer-facing software products or systems.
Personally, I'd find a statement like "when building products for customer
use, the system administrator may take on the role of [product architect|UI
designer|software developer|etc.]" to be a better phrase. However, that
temporary assumption of a role that is a facet within the scope of System
Administration doesn't mean someone ceases to be a sysadmin. When I work on
the specifications of a contract for a new storage system, that doesn't make
me a purchasing agent. When I work on the language used in our software
distribution agreement, that doesn't make me a lawyer. When I build products
for our customers to use, I'm still a systems administrator.
=>
=> David Lang
Mark "never, ever, make absolute statements!" Bergman
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