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Comment by dalore | Hacker News Reader

Same thing with system administrators. If you're a bad sysadmin your stuff is going to break constantly and you will look like your working hard to fix it. If you're good at it, hardly anything will go wrong and to management it looks like you sit on your butt all day.

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Yeah I saw a case when sysadmins left an exchange database to grow to crazy size and then it failed, cue days of trying to restore backups which also failed because disaster recovery practices had never been written or tested. After about a week I expected everyone to get sacked, instead they got a literal standing ovation for their ceaseless scrambling around.

On the other hand, if the people working hard to fix the thing expect to get sacked, they will probably leave before they finish fixing it.

Management is really really hard.

No it's not. All you have to do is treat people right and not be a sociopath.

If you do your job right, you look lazy and they ask why they are paying you in the first place.

If you have no idea what you are doing, you run around, look really busy and that justifies your position.

Shitty companies fire the first guy and keep the second.

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

-- God(?), Futurama

That is from the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), chapter 17.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching_%28Wikisource_tr...

There's a guy in my company who rose to upper-middle management faster that anyone I've ever seen. The key to his success was constantly running around, getting social exposure by talking to everybody (about inane bullshit most of the time) and trying to make himself look important.

In the meantime, we lost a really good engineer who was thought to be a slacker because he was a quiet guy and wouldn't expose himself too much.

This sociopathic and pathologic behavior is very common in companies run by "business people with ideas" instead of engineers. It's all based on chest beating, who you know and how much of a smooth talker you are. It's like being in high school all over again. Meritocracy is nowhere to be found.

I once introduced a fairly serious bug into our software. It caused, probably, a 40% drop in perceived performance. The bug was based entirely on me misunderstanding what one of the EE's told me. I fixed it in the next release and was lauded in a meeting for improving performance.

SysAdmin/DevOps here. My current environment is "Everything works, but unless you're at your desk 8-10 hours a day minimum, you're not working." Also, expected to be on call 24/7.

Not every place is like that. But I find it to be the majority.

Programmer here. I've been in two places like that. One relied on its reputation to leverage and squeeze people to the last drop; the other, more realistically maybe, just paid a lot and expected a great deal of work and a constant display of busyness. Both companies eventually had to face very serious issues caused by an unnaturally high staff turnover. Admittedly, a great company culture can be seriously financially rewarding if the management is able to create and cultivate it. Since not everyone has this ability and, let's face it, some software products are just dull to build, but still have a market, I guess that a moderate amount of squeeze works for long enough for the average so-so manager to justify their salary until they leave themselves, without giving any real benefit for the company in the long run :(

Yes, this article is the most relevant to sysadmins.

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