Communications of the ACM

Don’t document or automate
your operations.

This point is a little controversial. Some people think they increase their value by refusing to document anything. It makes them unfireable. The truth is employees who keep playbooks and other documentation up to date are highly valued by managers.

Likewise, some sysadmins fear if they write too much automation, it will put them out of a job. The truth is if you automate a task out of existence, there will always be more tasks waiting to be automated. The person who does this is a workforce-multiplier: one person enabling others to do the work of many. That is highly valuable.

Therefore, if you want to devalue yourself, do not document or automate. Assure everyone you will document something later: resist the temptation to update wikis as you perform a task. When asked to automate anything, just look the person in the eye, sigh, and say, “I’m too busy to save time by automating things.”

Focus on technology,
not business benefits.

That new server you want to buy is awesome, and if the business cannot understand that, yell louder.

Some people disagree. They think ev-
ery technology purchase should be jus-
tified in terms of how it will benefit the
business in ways that relate to money
or time—for example, a server that will
consolidate all sales information, mak-
ing it possible for salespeople to find
the information they need, when they
need it. How boring. It is much more
fun to explain it is 20T of SSD-accelerat-
ed storage, Intel 5655 CPUs, and triple-
redundant power supplies.

If you want to devalue yourself, describe projects in ways that obscure their business value. Use the most detailed technical terms and let people guess the business reason. Act as if the business is there to serve technology, not the other way around.

Only hire people that look like you. Diversity is about valuing the fact that people with different backgrounds bring different skills to the table. Studies find the addition of a single person with a different background improves a team’s productivity.

Productivity? Sounds like the opposite of devaluing yourself. To truly devalue yourself, make sure everyone on your team thinks the same way, has the same skills and similar backgrounds, and makes all the same mistakes.

As I wrote earlier, respect is a two-way street. If you want to devalue yourself, do not value differences.

Be the weird one.

Be “the weird one” in your company. It does not matter that your co-workers do not understand your obscure references to Dune, Animaniacs, and LOTR. The spice must flow so we can make the bologna to put in our slacks before we head to Mount Doom. Pretend you do not notice the confused looks you get. Surely everyone has read Dune. Don’t explain your cultural references and don’t stop making them just because nobody understands them.

Many may consider someone who
is diverse to be weird, but these are two
different concepts. Diversity is about
valuing differences. Being weird is
about being oblivious to other people’s
reactions. Diversity requires a commit-
ment to educating and being educated.
Being weird is the opposite.

Everyone should be free to fly a freak-flag. If you want to devalue yourself, never explain.

Refer to the server room as the Shire. Don’t say “happy birthday,” say “happy hatchling day.” Any time something has a red button, ask if it is candy-like.

Be difficult to find.

You cannot be valuable if you don’t exist. If you are difficult to find or are not available when people need you, you aren’t providing value to anyone.

Work strange hours. Do not arrive until noon—unless the corporate culture is to arrive at noon; then arrive early.

Either way, make sure your work hours don’t overlap well with the people who need you.

Concluding Thoughts

If we all make a concerted effort, then all sysadmins, as a community, can make sure the role of system administrator stays devalued for a very long time.

Related articles on queue.acm.org

Innovation and Inclusion

Telle Whitney, Elizabeth Ames http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2676861

Are You Invisible?

Jack Rosenberger http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/94307- are-you-invisible/fulltext

Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron

Thomas A. Limoncelli http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313

Thomas A. Limoncelli is a site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow, Inc. in NYC. His books include The Complete April Fools’ Day RFC ( www.rfchumor.com), The Practice of Cloud Administration ( the-cloud-book.com) and Time Management for System Administrators (O’Reilly). He blogs at EverythingSysadmin.com.