14. Staying Happy

A number of systems administrators, or computer system operators, that I know are finding it very hard in these times of layoffs and cautious business plans to even imagine what they, in better economic times, had come to expect in terms of personal fulfillment on the job. Some only remember that their career goals used to be a lot more aggressive than simply staying employed. Others notice that their employers or bosses, who might have once gone out of their way to ensure that their employees were busy and satisfied with their work, are now preoccupied with the larger issue of staying afloat. All this at a time when, because of the shift in national and personal priorities, many of us are looking for a deeper connection to the things that bring value to our lives.

While it may be true that a large percentage of the population is looking for meaning in their daily lives, it is probably more true of systems administrators than most computer professionals that finding happiness on the job is a challenge. Part of the challenge comes with the profession itself. Systems administrators are afflicted with several specific stresses. It is how they decide to react to these stresses that determines whether they are fulfilled or simply frustrated.

One of the difficulties that systems administrators face is that they tend to be at the beck and call of everybody. There are very few positions in the typical company that offer so little protection from the impatient, the demanding, and the annoyed. To make matters worse, and as some of the more vocal of our crowd have often complained, it is when you do your job best that you are least noticed and least appreciated.

It's also true that systems administrators are seldom in the mainstream of their company's business. For this reason, it's nearly impossible for them to garner satisfaction from a sense that they've contributed to their company's success or to its customer's satisfaction. When they work long hours, they're generally doing things that no one else really understands or finds interesting. It may take them half the night to discover that a memory problem on a server has been interfering with the running of some important job—and about all the troubleshooting skills that they can summon. Then, when at the staff meeting the solution is reduced to "John fixed a memory problem on server B", it sounds like something that could have been fixed in five minutes and by anyone off the street.

Systems administrators also suffer from extreme fluctuations in their work flow. At times, we're so busy that a phone call from one troubled user is being interrupted by several others. At other times, we find ourselves searching for something to fix or improve, something to hold our interest for a while—in an intellectual desert of "nothing's broken".

Sometimes we work alone and have no one to bounce our ideas against and no one to acknowledge the small miracles that we pull off. At other times, we work in groups and find ourselves assigned to so narrow a slice of the pie that we could fear we could easily automate ourselves out of a job.

After ten or twenty years of adding to our skill set, we often remain at the bottom of the organizational structure.

Given these deep and abiding challenges, a career in systems administration might not seem to have much appeal. There are, however, numerous arguments that we can make in arguing for our choices and numerous ways that we can derive reward from our work whether or not our organizations choose to understand and appreciate our contributions.

One of the benefits of being a systems administrator is that we have a good degree of job mobility. Almost any organization needs some of us to keep their systems in line. Irrespective of the particular industry that we work in, the required skills are pretty much the same.

There are also a lot of sub-specialties that we can delve into as we advance and need more challenge. These include networking, security, and various types of programming.

Though our numbers at any particular company or site may be small, we have a large representation nationally and internationally—even organizations like SAGE that focus on our work and our concerns. We can reap a certain reward from doing our work well and making good decisions as there are many standards that we can measure ourselves against that are well represented in books and online.

Perhaps, best of all, we have the satisfaction of an ever-changing technology. For "sysadmins", there is always something new to learn and always some problem that we have never seen before to keep us on our toes.