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Comment by megablast | Hacker News Reader

In my limited experience, you can never make the system guys love you, nobody can.

Simply put, system guys have a lot of downtime, where they do stuff that they enjoy, rather than work. So anytime anyone interrupts them from this, they are going to be annoyed, it is only natural. You are taking them away from fun, to something boring, and annoying to fix.

Regarding the article, I am not sure why hosting considerations aren't talked about at the beginning of the project. Even working with non-technical people, this has always been one of the first issues. Are we going to host it here, are you going to host it, can it use a shared platform, does it need a database. This is all thought about at the start of the project, and if need be a systems guy is bought in.

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If the system guys you have worked with have lots of downtime you have only worked with crap sysadmins.

I'm guessing in this case downtime does not refer to systems being in a down state but rather the sysadmins have time to work on whatever interests them.

logicalstack's comment still makes sense if you interpret downtime to mean what you've just explained. Here are some ways that good systems guys fill their time in between deployments and triaging problems:

1. Reading security bulletins and proactively trying to determine if systems are affected and what to do about it.

2. Reading about upcoming hardware and software so that they can plan the best platforms to deploy applications to.

3. Auditing applications for various problems.

4. Doing routine testing of the validity of backups and how easily they might be restored.

I upvoted logicalstack back to 0 because he might have implied that if your systems guys are reading Hacker News all day and commenting on threads about TechCrunch articles, they might have better places to spend their reading time. Believe it or not, there really are systems guys that have their hands full doing real work and don't just sit back in their chair surfing the net and playing video games.

> Simply put, system guys have a lot of downtime, where they do stuff that they enjoy, rather than work.

Assuming you mean 'free time'.

It seems you think System Administration is mainly fire fighting and waiting around to fire fight. Most of the basic stuff got offshored in the early 2000s, and the stuff that hits third level will actually require serious investigation.

But most system administration these days isn't fixing broken stuff: it's design, automation, audits, monitoring, and an ongoing list of continual pre-emptive and proactive improvement.

The shit SAs who can't program and are still employed are living under a sword of Damocles. Their jobs have already gone to Bangalore, they're just don't know it yet.

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