Adele’s Aerie

I found myself in a strange situation a couple weeks ago, of needing to define the term “sysadmin” for a new friend who is not computer-inclined. I’ve surrounded myself too much over the past few years with people who exclusively live, eat and breathe IT buzzword and acronym bingo, a situation I intend to bring to a close as quickly as is convenient.

Here’s how I explained what I do for a living to an interested, intelligent, non-computer-inclined person:

You were curious about my work…

When I say “IT” I mean “information technology” — computers, networks, databases, and software programs.

Since nowadays much of IT is perceived to be like city power, water or sewer by end-user customers (email and the network to the internet is Just Supposed To Work, you know?), much of the IT project management work I do with the IT teams at USC is way, way, way behind the scenes of the university. But every now and then, I and the teams I work with are a tiny piece of some larger university-wide initiative that has a significant dependency on IT and the services we provide… and sometimes, there’s a really huge initiative.

Lots of my extended family members have no real clue what I do in my job.

I sometimes tell people that I make my living “herding computer geeks”. I’m an IT project manager, and offering the shorthand humor is easier and faster than providing a real explanation, which they might not be interested in anyway. I try not to offer too much technobabble unless someone intentionally asks for it!

A big company (that has since gone out of business) made a commercial to run during the Superbowl one year to advertise their IT project management and integration services. They used to offer (on a very large scale for very big companies) what I do on the scale of the university… their commercial kind of sums up what I do: EDS Cat Herders

The word “sysadmin” or “systems administrator” may be unfamiliar to you. That was my job title before one of my very savvy bosses here at USC figured out I could manage really complex projects with grace and aplomb, could give fairly polished presentations to high-powered committees and wear a suit comfortably, and also could still get technical enough to befriend the geeks and get them to work together to help get our projects done on time. (I hand out a lot of cookies in my internal meetings… you probably wouldn’t believe how much work most geeks will do if you just appreciate our work and then give out cookies!)

Here’s a site explaining what sysadmins do, and the little holiday they’ve tried to get started; they’re the unsung heroes of the internet, and the digital effects and animation that Hollywood depends on nowadays all runs on computer servers run by sysadmins, too: www.sysadminday.com

And yeah, sysadmins are geeks, and that’s kind of cool, in a geeky way: www.sysadminday.com/people.html

Sysadmins maintain the big computer servers in special facilities called data centers: www.sysadminday.com/hardware.html

One of the first big projects I managed at USC a couple years ago was the relocation of about 200 Unix servers from our old data center to our new data center, without breaking the services that our customers depend on (like email, or the calendar, or the software Blackboard that professors use to teach their classes, or the www.usc.edu website server) — my project team on that relocation project was about a dozen sysadmins plus a half-dozen hardware specialists. Contrary to expectations prior to my assignment on the project, there was only one complaint from a customer during the entire Unix team’s data center relocation.

Before that, at Caltech, I organized a data center move of about 65 Unix servers, with a team of about three. That project also turned out OK, but I have to recommend scheduling server moves to avoid rainy days unless you have a lot of plastic sheeting to spare.

Good sysadmins bring order from chaos; bad sysadmins make huge messes that give good sysadmins headaches and nightmares like you wouldn’t believe: www.sysadminday.com/horrors.html

If you want more nitty-gritty info on the profession, check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator (that page is rather dry and dull, though).

Even though I’m now a project manager and am slowly building my connections in that professional PM community, I’m still active in the professional community of sysadmins, and I’ve got some friends across the globe in an organization called LOPSA (the League of Professional System Administrators) that I see once or twice a year at technical conferences.

LOPSA teams up every year with various conferences, including the sizable one put together by the open-source computing community in Los Angeles called SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo)… that’s the conference I’m volunteering at on the weekend of February 20-22. My friends Jesse and Chris are teaching classes for LOPSA at the conference.

Your home computer is probably running Windows, or is a Mac. Do you know what Linux is? It’s a computer operating system (sometimes called an “OS”), like Windows or MacOS (one of which is the operating system that your home computer runs). Linux is an open-source variant of Unix, which is yet another operating system. Most of the really big computer servers that make up the internet are running a variant of Unix or Linux, and to a lesser degree, Windows.

I know that Pixar, the movie studio so famous now for so many gorgeous computer-animated films, runs mostly Linux for their animation computers; they seem to always be looking to hire Linux-specialist sysadmins.

Oh, you probably haven’t encountered the term “open-source” before, either. “Open-source” is a design philosophy that emphasizes technical and programming standards available to scrutiny by all, and a communal development environment… basically, it’s geeks designing and programming cool software in full public view of other geeks, so that the entire geeky technical community can contribute, and which will hopefully result in better products for everyone, and give the programmers more of an opportunity to learn from each other for the betterment of all. More info is at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source.

I hope I haven’t lost you in all this technobabble… it’s really not all that complicated, but IT does include a lot of specialized vocabulary that can sound very daunting. I’m happy to translate (from computer geek to English) if anything at all of this is confusing. If you want to know more… just ask.

In exchange, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of questions about your chosen profession at various points… I likely don’t know any of the specialized vocabulary that you use in your daily work activities, since I don’t work in your industry.