Communications - February 2011

taking care of yourself outside work and by having enough personal time. Vacations are important. Use them to give your mind a break so that you come back refreshed. Disconnect. Be out of touch. Trust your colleagues to survive without you.

the future

An SA’s job is constantly changing because of new technologies and the growing sophistication of the customer base. How do those changes alter which soft skills are required, or do they?

When my mother started out as an SA (actually an “operator”), only SAs had access to the machines, and they fed their colleagues’ programs into the card reader and handed back the results when the program was finished. Her colleagues’ expectations of how quickly tasks got done were vastly different from what we are accustomed to today. Her customer base was much smaller and universally tech savvy but was not as reliant on computers for everything. Her work was not as interrupt-driven as today, she had no email to handle, and her day consisted predominantly of project work rather than many small tasks for many different people. The soft skills required were inherently different from those discussed in this article.

Over the past four decades the soft skills that SAs need have changed substantially, and I expect that in the next four decades there will be more significant changes, many of which will be driven by changes in technology that are impossible to predict so far in advance. We can anticipate, however, that in the coming decades the soft skills discussed in this article are going to become increasingly important for SAs.

The connected population contin-
ues to grow, as do the ways to be con-
nected and to (re)connect with others,
yielding ever increasing electronic
communications. There is an increas-
ing “always-on” expectation that if
you are online (and why would you not
be?), you can respond to any message
immediately. Electronic communica-
tions cannot always create interrupts.
Time management and taking control
of electronic communications, rather
than letting them control us, are go-
ing to become increasingly important
for everyone, but especially for inter-
rupt-prone SAs.

conclusion

The role of SA can be stressful, but once you recognize what some of the stress factors are, you can alleviate much of that stress and turn the job into the rewarding position that it should be. There are various methods for reducing conflicts with colleagues, methods for coping with a lack of resources and an interrupt-driven environment, resolving conflicting priorities, and embracing the fact that SAs are held responsible for every failure. The discussion in this article was necessarily brief, but for those who would like more detail, all of these topics are described in greater depth in The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley, 2007). 2

Related articles on queue.acm.org

Collaboration in System Administration Eben M. Haber, Eser Kandogan, Paul Maglio

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1898149

Avoiding Obsolescence

Kode Vicious

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1781175

Beyond Instant Messaging

John C. Tang, James “Bo” Begole

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=966718

References

1. Limoncelli, T.A. Time Management for System Administrators. O’Reilly, 2005.

2. Limoncelli, T.A., Hogan, C. ., Chalup, S.R. The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd edition. Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA, 2007 .

3. Owen, H. The problem of PORCMOLSULB. ;login: The USENIX Magazine 27, 4 (Aug. 2002).

4. Smallwood, K. C. SAGE views: Whither the customer? ;login: The USENIX Magazine 17, 5 (Sept. 1992).

5. Zwicky, E. D. SAGE views: The customer isn’t always
right; the customer isn’t always even a customer.
;login: The USENIX Magazine 17, 6 (Nov. 1992).

Christina Lear worked for more than 10 years as a system administrator. She is a member of SAGE (the Usenix Special Interest Group for Sysadmins) and has been heavily involved in the Usenix LISA (large installation system administration) community. She co-authored The Practice of System and Network Administration with Thomas Limoncelli, for which they received the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award in 2005. More recently she obtained a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering and has worked as an aerodynamicist for a Formula 1 racing team.