Re: SysAdm dying as career in the USA?

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:33:11 +0200, Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:

tskirvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Tim Skirvin) writes:

...so complete hell, you're saying? Works 90% of the time, but
that last 10% is completely random? And there's no easy path to learn
how to fix those 10% of those cases?

Windows Update has worked well for me. I think it is the single most
important piece of technology Microsoft has released for the last 10
years.

Besides system administrators need a bit of pragmatism - you'll support
Windows users anyway.


OS maintenance for any system is but a small piece of what an SA does.
The bigger piece of the job is to figure out how to get all this stuff
working together, what has broken and why, and how to fix it once it has
broken. I personally think that the SA position is one of the least
likely to be off-shored. It is difficult (though I admit not impossible)
to do a bare-metal install remotely, to add a machine to the network and
to configure it, to resolve a sudden loss of communication to the network
or the SAN, etc. The problem for the outsourcers with that is that a
knowledge of Unix or Windows is not enough to resolve most of those kinds
of problems: one has to know the _organization's_ environment; how ones
own shop runs things, how they interact, how the pieces of the puzzle all
fit together. "Sally" in Bangalore isn't going to have that knowledge,
especially when next week "Sally" may take another job and you have to
deal with "Bobby." Salaries are indeed much lower in places like India,
but when an organization is obsessed with five 9's uptime, and outages
become longer and more frequent once the out-sourcing occurs, then even
the limited understanding of most managers and accountants is capable of
grasping the real dollar and cent cost of the move. And unless an
organization's entire shop is off-shored, who is going to help the DBAs
and the applications programmers when they have their problems? That is
actually a big part of what I do.

There will be organizations that try it. However, like the client-server
hype several years ago, I think the returns will be smaller than they
were led to believe, and the costs much higher, and the laws of economics
will force much (but not all) of the out-sourcing back to the local shop.
.

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