This is response to this post - I’ll Probably Never Hire Another Pure SysAdmin - and others like it I’ve seen lately.

Now I started out in IT back in the late 90’s, out of highschool. The internet wasn’t like it is now, with the wealth of information and thousands of blogs. We had Slashdot and that’s about it for high profile tech news and discussion sites. These days I imagine people interested in Systems Administration have a much broader range of articles to read and I imagine a lot stick with tech focused sites. That makes articles like this dangerous, because quite frankly, they’re wrong.

Sure, technology focused small companies may have less need of a Sysadmin. Of course, technology companies are going to be started by people who have at least a passing interest in technology in the first place. They probably have an idea and opinions about many facets of technology, from computer languages to operating systems. They’re comfortable getting Rackspace cloud machines or spinning up Amazon instances. They also are not a majority of businesses out there.

I’ve never worked for a technology company. I’ve always supported businesses that focus on non-technology endeavors. What I can tell you is that these companies are going to want to Sysadmins for some time to come. Some may try to do without them, but eventually they’re going to need them.

Now, I’m not sure what a Pure Sysadmin is. By nature of the profession I don’t believe there is a such thing. You have devops guys who are passable programmers. You have Sysadmins who come from the networking stack. You have the operating system gurus. You have the virtualization guys. There’s a lot to systems administration, and the areas you become good at often depends on your background and the needs of your current employer.

So, I’m going to dive more into business needs for Sysadmins, rather than focus on a specific type. Business has an interesting take on technology. You have the people who have no interest in technology. It’s a tool to get a job done. Don’t make the mistake of thinking these are dumb people who can’t learn technology. These are more often than not incredibly intelligent people who are too busy getting a job done to have the time to learn new technology. Executives, scientists, marketing geniuses and the like. These are the guys you’re supporting an Exchange environment for, because even though Zimbra or Google Apps seems like an obvious no brainer to you, they’re not interested in it. Heck, just updating Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2010 is a major migration for your company of 3000 employees, that costs more money than you care to think about in training and lost productivity.

Cloud seems great. In fact you’re going to have business users who do keep up with latest trends bringing it up all the time. However, with the cloud the business first loses dedicated support staff. Instead they’re sharing support staff with all the clouds other customers. Also, there’s information the business is just not comfortable hosting outside it’s walls. Accountability is big too. Also, when business is big enough, it needs to be able to schedule maintenance around the business, not vice versa. Google Apps is going down for maintenance that day you need the product up for a major trade show? Too bad. Better have a local copy you can demo and promise the clients you can show them the real thing later. I know my department has had to schedule around a conference before.

Business often dictates technology to you. This is actually one of the frustrating things you learn about being a Sysadmin. Yes, from a pure technical sense you probably are the most qualified to make the choice on what software the company should use. The reality is, you provide a service to that company and they’re going to tell you what software they want. It’s your job to make it work, no matter how frustrating it can be.

When you look at the pure dollars and cents, if the could was going to knock out the Sysadmin profession, it would have done it already. In a lot of cases it probably is cheaper to run in the cloud than host your own datacenter. IT departments are a cost. If the business isn’t technology based you spend lots of money while providing no revenue. Yet, we’re all still here. Heck, my department is over worked and we’d love to expand the budget to bring in a couple more people. Yet, most people aren’t using the cloud after years of it being available. Business needs infrastructure that fits it’s model. There’s no cookie cutter cloud solution that fits the core goals of a company. Lots have tried. Email gets outsourced, cloud provider goes down, suddenly they consider bring it back inhouse. Why? Well look, it’s easier to keep email up and running for a few hundred to few thousand accounts than it is to keep it running for a few million.

I’m a web guy, a large part of my work has been supporting web sites. I have yet to see where anything cookie cutter can support a company website of any decent size. Either the website is a major product offering, or a major marketing tool Either way, the business has specific features they want that website to offer. You may deploy a CMS, you’ll be customizing that CMS. You’ll also be doing a lot of web server tuning to make it work like they want it to work.

Businesses by now understand they need a solid infrastructure to run on. They need Sysadmins whom they should never see. Everything needs to just work, and when it’s not working they need to know that someone is fixing it immediately. Those someones should know it’s down before the business does and hopefully have it up before the problem is noticed. They need people who understand N+1 for redundancy and availability. They those guys who spend hours writing bash/perl/python/whatever monitoring scripts. They need the people setting up a WSUS server and scheduling patching for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and spending each of those mornings running tests on every machine to make sure Black Tuesday patches didn’t knock out a mail store or to be sure the Blackberry Server doesn’t need yet another reboot at 5am.

They need people who have an entire share of documentation and regularly have discussions about is it good enough that if someone had to replace them if it would be manageable or not. They need people who discuss that eventually most servers are going to need to switch to postfix because Redhat has moved to it and in a few years people are going to be looking for jobs knowing that instead of sendmail.

They also need people who can sit in on meetings and have intelligent conversations about business topics and how they relate to existing organization infrastructure and methods. As I said, I’m not sure what a Pure Sysadmin is. But I do know that Sysadmins aren’t going anywhere any time soon. So, if you have an interest in technology and business and are thinking Systems Administration is the way for you to go to enjoy your career, do it. Don’t hesitate. Heck, when I started down my path I thought I was going to be a developer. Then they started outsourcing those jobs and I became a Sysadmin with the though that they couldn’t outsource cause they need someone in house to manage those servers. Well, look around. The developer jobs came back. If there ever is a trend to move to the cloud for non-tech business, it won’t last half as long as the attempt to outsource development.

Simply put, the cloud can’t offer business the expertise it needs to be successful. The most the cloud will be is another tool in the Sysadmin arsenal to provide to best level of service to it’s customer, which is the business professional. That’s what we’ve been doing for decades and what we’ll continue to do.