What does a system administrator do?
“System administration is where theory meets practice with a vengeance.”
— Steve Simmons
I’ve been working as a system administrator for 4 months now. It is my first job and has given me a lot of exposure to what actually goes on the big bad world of software engineering. I’d like to think of system administrators (aka sysadmins) as the unsung heroes of the software engineering world. Just like Christian Bale says in The Dark Knight: “I am whatever Gotham needs me to be.”, we are whatever our company/project needs us to be! We work behind the scenes to ensure no harm is bestowed upon the residents of Gotham city. Just flash the Bat-Signal to summon us and we’ll be there to tend to your worries! I’d like to share my experience of being a sysadmin and what I like and don’t like about the role.
System administrators ensure that all software systems for which they are responsible are up and running. In case any problem comes up, sysadmins are summoned to showcase their skills and solve the problem at hand at the earliest. We interact with a wide variety of teams across the organization and help them resolve whatever technical issues they come across. Sysadmins get a birds’ eye view of what goes on in the organization. We get opportunities to automate routine tasks and bring innovation into age-old processes. Everyday in the life of a sysadmin is unique. Some days they may have no work at hand and on others they may be the busiest employee of the company.
Sysadmins grow with hands-on experience and not with training. Unlike developers who need to be extensively trained on the technology with which they work on, sysadmins begin working from day one with minimal training. Sysadmins are usually given access to all software systems under their radar, which gives us the freedom to explore anything and everything. However, with great power comes great responsibility! Even a tiny error such as an extra space or slash in production environment can impact the business of the organization. Yes, you read that right! Hence, every sysadmin needs to be extremely cautious with what they work on. Senior system engineers are very particular about granting access privileges to junior sysadmins. Every sysadmin should mess up something in production to realize the kind of power and responsibility that they hold. (Kidding! Although be ready to get reprimanded badly if you actually do it 😉) We get pinged and emailed and pulled into calls by multiple teams across the company when that happens, and its our responsibility to fix the issue ASAP so that their deliverables are not impacted.
We are summoned by people when their work is negatively affected, hence we usually have to deal with annoyed, restless or frustrated individuals who may not be in their best mood while interacting with us. We have to keep our cool and focus on solving the problem at hand, rather than letting their criticism get to our ego. As a sysadmin, you don’t get to actually build software products/solutions, which is something that I don’t like about this role. However, it is an important role and provides great value to the company, especially to larger ones. It’s also a great role for a fresh graduate to understand different processes that go on in a tech company. Hope you enjoyed reading this article! Happy reading and stay tuned!
