> I know that it's parody, but I think the whole sysadmin culture is incredibly toxic and glorifies toxicity.
It has been quite a long time since the days of grumpy greybeards ruled the roost.
Sysadmins, much like developers, are labour force multipliers. One big difference is, sysadmins and IT are often treated by businesses as an absolute minimal-possible-cost departments. They're frequently underfunded, short staffed, and rarely have any management buy in for hardware or software necessary to do the job reliably. That leaves sysadmins scrambling around trying to pull one miracle after another after another out of their butts, making hardware and software perform to a degree that it just isn't capable of doing. When you push software and hardware beyond its limits, that means lots of emergencies, lots of firefighting. It's really not rare to have to argue for having any kind of redundancy in hardware or software ("we can't justify the expense of a warm spare, or even a cold spare", "But this is the mission critical software our entire business relies on. Every second it's down is tens of thousands of dollars down the drain", "yeah, but we just don't have the budget for it, we need that for the CEO's golf trips".)
Throw on top of that business groups that keep buying software and hardware without engaging the sysadmins to evaluate suitability; software that often involves working further miracles to make it work for the company because fuck me so much of that shit is written by people that have no clue about a safe operating environment, but hey the CEO's nephew produced it and we've already paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars for it that he's already spent on a sports car and we can't get a refund (I truly wish I was exaggerating there, that's a for real situation a friend found themselves in).
This is the continual story of sysadmin life. It's one reason why I eventually moved on to systems engineering / cloud platforms ops. It's just sheer constant stress courtesy of management that just don't give a shit while things are working, and then lay a crap load of blame on you when things fail.
Want to make any guesses now why sysadmins are frequently grumpy? It's not because they set out to be, or want to be. Very few do (most of those obstructionist greybeards are long gone). It's because they literally don't have time or energy left after being continually burned out from performing one miracle after another. For what it's worth, I see the exact same kinds of grumpiness from developers and other staff in businesses that don't give a shit about how much they're burning out their staff. It just seems like it's more visible in sysadmins because they end up having to deal with a far wider range of staff across a company.
A well funded IT stack makes it as friction-less as possible for employees in a company to get their job done. Technical problems employees have get dealt with quickly so they can be back up and working at peak productivity, because there will be sufficient helpdesk employees with sufficient training to keep the quality bar high (trying to get funding for training is another nightmare, especially for helpdesk). Platforms and technology they rely on are reliable. Mistakes made by employees are easily recovered from (files restored from backups, ransomware is isolated and easily remedied). The list goes on and on.
> When you push software and hardware beyond its limits, that means lots of emergencies, lots of firefighting. It's really not rare to have to argue for having any kind of redundancy in hardware or software ("we can't justify the expense of a warm spare, or even a cold spare", "But this is the mission critical software our entire business relies on. Every second it's down is tens of thousands of dollars down the drain", "yeah, but we just don't have the budget for it, we need that for the CEO's golf trips".)
> This is the continual story of sysadmin life. .... It's just sheer constant stress courtesy of management that just don't give a shit while things are working, and then lay a crap load of blame on you when things fail.
yes, this, a thousand times; my job security lies in my shit eating grin and capacity to ignore exactly this structural idiocy.
Isn't this why those jobs also have huge churn? The people who can get out, do. Leaving only those without the ability to find another job.
I know as a developer I have churned quickly when it turned out that "occasional overtime" meant constantly babysitting systems that were never finished, just patched together enough to run for a day without obvious disasters. That was the explicit metric in one place, they literally would not address a bug unless it caused the system to fail before the daily restart. "daily" meaning some developer had to wake up at 2am and remote in to manually restart a bunch of things in exactly the right order, then debug and fix any newly revealed problems (because this was also when new versions were started in production for the first time).
My record so far is less than an hour in a new job - I turned up for my first day and one boss was berating the other boss over the phone. As soon as they saw me they handed me the phone and ran out of the room. I got an earful before I managed to say "Hi, I'm psychlist and I was supposed to start working here today". I did actually let them talk me through fixing the immediate problem, then I hung up and walked out.
It has been quite a long time since the days of grumpy greybeards ruled the roost.
Sysadmins, much like developers, are labour force multipliers. One big difference is, sysadmins and IT are often treated by businesses as an absolute minimal-possible-cost departments. They're frequently underfunded, short staffed, and rarely have any management buy in for hardware or software necessary to do the job reliably. That leaves sysadmins scrambling around trying to pull one miracle after another after another out of their butts, making hardware and software perform to a degree that it just isn't capable of doing. When you push software and hardware beyond its limits, that means lots of emergencies, lots of firefighting. It's really not rare to have to argue for having any kind of redundancy in hardware or software ("we can't justify the expense of a warm spare, or even a cold spare", "But this is the mission critical software our entire business relies on. Every second it's down is tens of thousands of dollars down the drain", "yeah, but we just don't have the budget for it, we need that for the CEO's golf trips".)
Throw on top of that business groups that keep buying software and hardware without engaging the sysadmins to evaluate suitability; software that often involves working further miracles to make it work for the company because fuck me so much of that shit is written by people that have no clue about a safe operating environment, but hey the CEO's nephew produced it and we've already paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars for it that he's already spent on a sports car and we can't get a refund (I truly wish I was exaggerating there, that's a for real situation a friend found themselves in).
This is the continual story of sysadmin life. It's one reason why I eventually moved on to systems engineering / cloud platforms ops. It's just sheer constant stress courtesy of management that just don't give a shit while things are working, and then lay a crap load of blame on you when things fail.
Want to make any guesses now why sysadmins are frequently grumpy? It's not because they set out to be, or want to be. Very few do (most of those obstructionist greybeards are long gone). It's because they literally don't have time or energy left after being continually burned out from performing one miracle after another. For what it's worth, I see the exact same kinds of grumpiness from developers and other staff in businesses that don't give a shit about how much they're burning out their staff. It just seems like it's more visible in sysadmins because they end up having to deal with a far wider range of staff across a company.
A well funded IT stack makes it as friction-less as possible for employees in a company to get their job done. Technical problems employees have get dealt with quickly so they can be back up and working at peak productivity, because there will be sufficient helpdesk employees with sufficient training to keep the quality bar high (trying to get funding for training is another nightmare, especially for helpdesk). Platforms and technology they rely on are reliable. Mistakes made by employees are easily recovered from (files restored from backups, ransomware is isolated and easily remedied). The list goes on and on.