Tag: System Administration

“Naturally”

In the fourth edition of the bat book I read:

Naturally, such a recovery should never be necessary if your machine is properly backed up, and if you keep your source files under some form of revision control, such as rcs(1).

Upon reading the passage, my memory triggered and brought to my attention again cvi, a handy little tool by Sotiris Tsimbonis just for this purpose.

Naturally.

The sysadmin paradox

The sysadmin paradox, n.:
The fact that when your system administrator is constantly running behind problems is perceived to be working and being productive, as opposed to being perceived as idle while managing a working infrastructure.

Our aim is to eliminate ourselves from the management of the system, to be considered as “not needed” because the system has no problems, therefore we do not work enough. Luckily, whenever (if) this happens, new more complex requirements emerge and the circle continues.

staying up late

engineering student

When the image popped in my timeline, I was immediately reminded of Bob Lucky‘s May 1998 essay about Electrical Engineering:

“Electrical engineering will be in danger of shrinking into a neutron star of infinite weight and importance, but invisible to the known universe.”

Others fear that CS might not be far behind. And systems administration, even in its DevOps morph is not far behind too. So while the artist (anybody knows who the artist is?) drew that with engineering students in mind, the image reflects the situation for more.

Happy 2012 to you all.

on management

“a contract, hence an agreement, between superior and subordinate. The subordinate agrees to make his actions serve his supervisor’s intent in terms of what is to be accomplished, while the superior agrees to give his subordinate wide freedom to exercise his imagination and initiative in terms of how intent is to be realized.”

John Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, slide 76.

Bureaucracies and information flow (take 2)

Actually just a few observations others have made, but observations I live within everyday:

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

With the first group exibiting oligarchic behavior, dysergy follows. I will add an exception to Pournelle’s Law: IT people are devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself, yet as a perceived “cost center” they get eliminated too. Interestingly, this happens because as observed by the Shirky Principle:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

IT people do not easily accept the fact that part of their work is to make themselves redundant and by objecting to that (and therefore by maintaining their own internal bureaucracy) they get eliminated while fighting interdepartmental wars that have nothing to do with the organization’s mission. The rest of the departments understand the lesson IT took only after their time comes too.

I had heard Shirky’s Principle years ago (pre 2000) stated by me supervisor at the time in a different way:

A bureaucracy’s first objective is to maintain itself. Then to fulfill the reason it was created for.

Lost in translation. I think I’m going to find myself a Permit A 38 now.

Update 2011/12/21: Peter Drucker writes:

People are so convinced they are doing the right things and so committed to their cause that they come to see the institution as an end in itself. But that’s a bureaucracy

(part 1)