It’s tough to be a systems administrator.  System Administrstor Day 2011 comes and goes with no fanfare here.

But I feel I have to give a bit of credit to the IT guy who responds to the never ending run of calls with a never ending supply of patience.

So, here’s a listing from a Dell infographic of nine frustrations the systems administrator faces along with one of my own from the Google+ community.

10 Things to Frustrate a Systems Administrator:

1. Wasted time or lack of progress.
2. Stupid or preventable mistakes.
3. 100+ gigabytes of MP3 files on the network drive.
4. Users who play with all the wires.
5. Users who don’t write down error messages.
6. Users who are not careful about what they are downloading.
7. Users who call every time an electronic machine doesn’t work – like a photocpier.
8. Users who resend the print job 20 times in rapid succession when the printer is not working.
9. Users who don’t break large print jobs down into smaller chunks.

And our 10th comes from Gary Walter on Google+ who writes:

Questions about using common software and PCs, that should be common knowledge. And are not necessarily “system” issues.

Nice one!

Update: A few more to add:

Barbara Godin – Inconsistent application of international standards and best practices at every layer by people who call themselves “engineers” when they’re actually developers…developers…developers.

Edward Henry – Lack of documentation, change management and inter-disciplinary communication. As much as we all hate meetings, expecially ones that can lead to heated discussions, they’re unavoidable after the scale of technology that you support reaches a magnitude that requires you to branch your IT dept into a disciplinary structure.

Alex Williams (Not me, really. :) ) – User error & not reading directions.

Services Angle

Why is the systems administrator so frustrated? I think it may hav a bit to do with what EMC’s Chuck Hollis wrote about and which we recounted in a blog post today.

The enterprise has any number of silos. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that it is unmanageable to run IT the old way. People have too many devices, storage options and applications. There’s just so much that can be manually done.

The modern systems administrator may get a lot more respect if part of a DevOps culture. Those are the people who will be sought after as they can better understand the relationship between services, platforms and foundation technologies. It’s the services professional who will provide the value. The systems administrator can have that role but it’s up to the organization’s leaders to make that happen.