Re: RE: present day admin skills

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

[...]
> Now, tell me this makes folks comfy with the skills of the persons that the
> current IT industry has been hiring for the past 10-20 years?  Tell me that
> it really requires a senior level admin to know the easy way to do the tasks
> outlined above rather then a mid-level or lower level admin to do such
> things, when I can go to any #linux channel on any irc server and find 12
> year olds that know these commands, and know them well or at least parse
> this info from the man page or their copy of Unix In A Nutshell. this bode
> well for the future,  but it remains a solid issue today. 

So we've got 12yr olds doing system admin and software development being
done in the cheap labour camps in India (yes, this is an exageration, of
sorts).  What % of the IT workforce is now redundant (or about to get a
huge pay cut) ?

Well, for one thing, who is going to teach the 12yr olds?  You can't have
them "learning" when something strange happens on your mission critical
database, just as its not very helpful if a critical bug fix in a mission
critical application has a turnaround time of > 12 hours because of time
zone problems.

Someone who's spent 10-20 years in the IT workplace doing system admin is
more likely to know the nuances of which commands to run in what order when
your NIS+ client/servers are having authentication problems or that, be able
to offer suggestions about planning upgrades, etc.

I think until you've had to deal with users', any claim of system
administration skills must remain suspect, no matter how many systems
of your own you have at home to hack on.  I'd exclude friends from that
category too.  When you have real users who make requests, manangement
that makes demands and have to deal with those, then you're a system
administrator.  At that point knowing which commands to use is just part
of the problem solving which is part of daily life as a system admin and
so being a 12yr old who just happens to have memorized various man pages
doesn't really cut it any more.

Darren
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