Interesting dissonance between the breakneck speed of change in IT and the glacial pace of changes in IT...
Are YOU The One? Become a guru of your chosen sysadmin path
Systems administrators are system administrators, right? Not really. Once upon a time systems admins were jack of all trades and (perhaps) master of them all. Most of the IT-related functions were performed by an administrator and if some new technology came along they adapted and learnt the new package or system. However, as …
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Tuesday 21st April 2015 13:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
While there certainly are free-lancers who've got a good range of skills and are able to take a global view, there are also loads who talk the talk but are full of BS. Equally there are some employees who've got the experience and know how to take a global view.
I haven't seen much evidence to suggest that employment status makes a big difference in that.
On the other hand I have seen many occurrences of free-lancers coming in and repeating what the internal staff have been saying for years, only to be believed just because their free-lance.
I've been on both sides of that one!
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Friday 17th April 2015 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
The worst of both worlds...
...being the one man band at an SME which is bought by a larger company. Your local managers (normal bods, not IT people) expect you to deliver the same service as before but the new owners insist on you following all the complexities their procedures introduce, and you have to work out which helpdesk to ring for which part of the system as often a team introduces a policy that borks another part of the system and its a nightmare getting anyone else to see the overall picture.
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Friday 17th April 2015 13:42 GMT Keith Langmead
Moving "Up"
Some interesting points but I find it somewhat insulting and condescending that you (and to be fair others as well) refer to it as a move UP, as if by narrowing your field of expertise to a single area (at the expense of all others) that it somehow makes you better and more important. Granted, in the long run specialists may tend to have greater potential for earning more than generalists, but I'd suggest that's more about that individual focusing on becoming the best in that field, than their speciality simply conferring that on them.
Let's stick with calling it what it really is, a move across. I imagine there are plenty of us generalists that would consider your description of workplace politics, paperwork, red tape and loss of autonomy as a move DOWN!
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Friday 17th April 2015 18:49 GMT Mark 85
Re: Moving "Up"
I believe you are spot on. But the logic behind this isn't logical. In the academic world you move by getting advanced degrees and each move is more specialized. Sadly, a generalist who has a world view of things and knows that if Team "A" do "X", then something will crash for Team "B" is out of favor because they can point the finger, affix the blame, and solve the problem. The specialist lose out on that glory. It's business politics at it's best (or worst) and comes from the worlds of academia and government. I'm usually surprised that business work at all sometimes.
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Saturday 18th April 2015 06:16 GMT Sgt_Oddball
the grass is always 0,255,0
I've worked for smb all of my I.T. Life and found trying to get into more specialised roles nigh on impossible (a dba who understands. Net? Preposterous! Helpdesk who can develop? Devils work, network admin who can build a server blindfolded? Madness!) but then in my last firm they started to put more and more processes in place resulting in so much work by committee that trying to get creative or do the right thing (rather than patch up the problem for another month or so) became a lesson in frustration.
I think I prefer being a master of my own domain these days.