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What are the things that happen in your job that make you say, "Yeah, now that's why I'm a system administrator"? What are the things that you take delight in in your job? While I did wait for a Friday to post this, I'm hoping that "Weekends" and "Money" are not the top voted answers. Rules:
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Ok, I'll bite. NEW TOYS It's still hard to believe that someone else will pay me to use their money to buy and play with servers. | |||||
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I like fixing things. I like fixing them in the way that means I never have to fix them again. The more complex and snarly the problem the happier I am when I get it done. | |||||||||||||||||
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To quote Hannibal from the A-Team: "I love it when a plan comes together" There's a great satisfaction in pulling off a large or critical or highly visible implementation. We recently moved an entire department to another floor and did it very effectively with very positive responses from the users being moved. For us it involved extending the network, IP phone deployment, PoE for the first time in the company, etc. etc. A small example of why I love what I do. | ||||
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I love pretty much all aspects of my job, but it's an especially big feel-good for me when I can help someone solve a problem that they've been beating their head against the wall on. Knowing that someone can work better is a great feeling. The ego boost from being the one that can solve the problem ain't bad, either ;) | |||||||||||
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It gives me a valid reason to drink heavily on the off hours. | ||||
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I like going into a situation that is perceived by others to be a crisis or a full-blown emergency and then having the knowledge and skills to calm everyone and make it all better. EDIT One example of me being the hero: I used to freelance IT work and still do, on the side, from some of my old clients. One particular client owns a jewelry store and was running his database of customers on an old windows 98 machine. The software was dos-looking and had previously ran under windows 95. I told him numerous times that his hard drive was going south, but he never had the time to do anything about it...until early one Saturday morning when it wouldn't boot. His database of clients and inventory from the past 15 years was suddenly gone. He called me and asked for advice. I told him the info was likely gone forever. Then I picked up the drive, brought it to my office, and recovered all of the data, including the install software. I installed the software on a virtual machine and exported it to something I could work with. He was blown away that I was able to save his info.... and paid me accordingly. | ||||
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I love solving problems. Taking a serious issue and working backwards to try and find the cause. I'm not a big CSI fan but when I break out WireShark and start examining data packet by packet ultimately pointing me to the answer... it just feels good. It's also very much appreciated when others acknowledge the work you've done since most of what I, and I'm sure many of you, do is not plainly visible. | ||||
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Making the organization run harder, better, faster and stronger in ways that no one knew could be done with the aid of well chosen and implemented IT systems. Ultimately I suppose even that reason boils down to: Making people happy. | ||||
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I have similiar feelings to Kevin Kuphal re: being happy when a planned project comes out successful, except that I enjoy it more when the users don't ever realize that anything happened. Rollouts of new infrastructure hardware, server computers, etc, that take place behind the scenes and happen totally seamlessly just make me giddy. If I've done my job right, someone might say "Gee-- xyz system seems to be running faster...", but that's all I ever hear about it. Ahhh... job satisfaction. | ||||
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For the love of technology is, or should be, a primary reason to be a system administrator; The love of hacking on software and hardware; and the added bonus of getting to play with cool tech that lusers don't understand. I mean, there's no way, outside of my job, that I could get to play with i and z-series hardware. | ||||
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I believe well managed IT, and free access to information, will bring about the greatest revolution in human history. I just want to play a part. And I like to fix things. | ||||
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To comply with the "One answer per post" rule, here's another thing that keeps me coming back: Implementing something that allows an end user or group of users to get home earlier. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that if you streamline someone's work day they oftentimes feel awkward that they don't have to spend 11 hours at work and end up filling up the vacuum of time with different busy-work. =( | ||||
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Building products and services that I'm proud of and that people want to use. | ||||
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Making life easier for the end-users. Sometimes, spoiling them with little nuances that make things easier. No, seriously. At the end of the day, if the lives of the end-users that are using (afflicted with?) the software/systems are better in some small way, then I know it's a job well done. I know there are similar answers, but hear me out - mine's slightly different. I think it has something to do with pursuing a personal work philosophy that is akin to Eudaimonia; and in Systems Administration, happiness in your work means pursuing excellence that makes your effort worthwhile, IMHO. The measure of that excellence will be in the satisfaction of the people that appreciate or use your efforts (given the nature of the job). So, making systems better and better for our users = happier users = better lives for them and me. And if everyone's lives are better, then I know as I head home, deep in my heart, that it was a good day to be a SysAdmin. | ||||
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I've seen a lot of answers about Teaching users. In my opinion one of the most valuable resources I get from my job is not spreading education but receiving it. Everything from learning about a little known command-line tool, to figuring out what signs indicate a new problem. There is a lot to be gained from any of these kind of jobs especially if you have any co-workers. I guarantee that they know things related to your job that you don't, if you see them do something interesting, ask them about it! A lot of people are happy to share what they know (as long as it isn't sensitive) if for no other reason than to show off how much they know. You get the bonus of improving your relationship with your co-worker at the same time as learning something cool! | ||||
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Whenever I get to design a network or deploy a specific system it carries my name. Meaning I do my best to deliver performance, cost, and satisfy the client expectations. Its not a job, but part of my play time. It feels good when I get to fix somebody else mess. I get to be superman!. | ||||
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Refactoring or reworking solutions to be as simple as possible. I like to see the build instructions for something (e.g. a server build) to be as simple as possible: The feeling that someone else will come along later and find my setup to be perfectly sensible and sane. | ||||
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As I mentioned in my biography I am working in Family company, where I was one of the most recent team members. At start of my carrier I was working as courier (runner) and nobody gives me a serious tasks holding me for mountebank (unaccountable, muff). Years of hard work and proving that I can do thing in right way, I took control over all IT's in our Company. Some time when my Mother acquaint me to someone and she said: " This is my son and he is held all computer systems in our company and We can't go on without him anymore he is good in his job". What makes her especially proud of her son ME Then I said to myself "Yeah, now that's why I'm a system administrator" | ||||
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Taking a problem or need that requires me (or some minion) to visit every desktop, and scripting it into a it's fixed on the next reboot. Testing of course prevents the "HOLY CRAP what happened to your computer?" | ||||
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I love the feeling after you have just finished designing something and know it is "just right." Everyone knows that feeling, you know this piece of tech is going to run without too much intervention for a long time. This can be anything from a script that took you an hour to write to a long multi month project to implement some cool new tech, or make things just run better. The only thing that tops that is when you think to yourself a year later "I should really check on that even though i haven't seen an alert for a long time" And it is still chugging along just fine doing what it was designed to do. | ||||
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Teaching people. When you can show them how they can accomplish something faster and better, that's awesome. I have the fortune of working in a school division, and while it has been mostly after-hours and extra-curricular, teaching kids Scratch or robotics is where it is at. | ||||
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I enjoy figuring out what is wrong and how to fix it. Really, being a sysadmin is an exercise in logic puzzles (insofar as it deals with computers, at any rate). | ||||
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Seeing the architecture and the systems you've designed and put into place to serve actual business needs, maybe tweaked and tuned for many years, actually take care of themselves and fix problems with little or no human intervention - ie noticing one or more systems raising themselves above chaotic and basic levels of operation, thanks to your plans, towards true pro-activity :) | ||||
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Or how about this: stopping intruders with a wall of fire and redirecting spam into the void :-) | ||||
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Wielding god-like power over servers and scores of user accounts, especially when working from the command line, and starting my command with 'sudo ...' :-) Edit: is it me, or is this starting to look like the Conan speech | ||||
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