On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Justin Lintz <[email protected]> wrote: > Last year at work I got our group an intern for the summer and once he > started I realized we were having a hard time finding the right projects for > him. Generally internships are from 6-8 weeks and a lot of sys admin > related work requires root to perform the tasks. With development > internships you can just give them a small coding project or some bugs to > correct in code and gently introduce them into the environment, with a sys > admin position a lot of the tasks and basic routine tickets required root. > We ended up taking him out to the datacenter a few times, showing him the > cage setup, walked him through the ropes of getting a new server up and > running from the cabling into the kickstart. His Linux knowledge was shaky > so I spent time with him showing him the ropes of the command line, > explaining the permissions of the files,taught him the basics of configuring > an IP on a test linux desktop we gave him and installing apache and getting > a hello world page. The 6 weeks flew by real fast and I felt bad for not > having a well thought out program for him or being able to give him any > substantial projects. He was very appreciative of the opportunity even if > it was a lot of job shadowing to learn about the job role and high level > introductions to things. I'm curious as to how the rest of the group > handles sys admin internships and what sort of programs they have laid out > for a time frame of 6-8 weeks for someone. Do you give them the keys to the > car and shadow them while they are doing tasks? Do they have only access to > the staging or development environments where if something goes wrong its > not that big of a deal? > - Justin Lintz
I can't say I've dealt with interns, but if there's one thing that needs to be instilled in all Admins at an early point is *diligence*. You MUST learn to follow procedures _in sequence_ and in every last detail. You must be able to accomplish every part of a task, without slacking off in the end (like, who needs labels after you've spent all weekend racking servers?). You must be able to push through laziness and do the little things that are not fun to do. They must realize that SysAdminning is not about playing with toys, it's about *managing* the resources. Management involves keeping track of things in whatever tracking system you use, making sure all documentation is up to date, and having confidence in your processes when you're in a crisis. This is the area where real learning would take place. Anyone in or just out of college has already gotten the idea that it's fun to play with technology. You're not teaching them anything if you just give them more stuff to play with. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
