Sysadmins and Charlatans
I’ve known my share of sysadmins who held some measure of belief that the more secrets they kept to themselves, the more secure their job was. It’s a belief held amongst a good portion of bad sysadmins, and unfortunately for them, it usually restricts their career more than it ever helps. Clinging desperately to power, a bad sysadmin like this will hoard information like Gollum to the Ring, and attempt to undermine anyone knowledgeable who comes near.
A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday. [...] Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.
This guy has taken his particular brand of sysadmin paranoia all the way to jail. If I were a betting man, I’d say that there’s no way this kind of person was intelligent enough to truly do enough to lock everyone else out, and someone with some real skills will actually resolve the predicament for the city in no time.
How does someone like this get so far into a position of power?
Typically, it’s by becoming a false prophet of IT, filling the ears of superiors and colleagues with bullshit simply because they don’t know any better. If a guy like this gets in a company at the ground floor, how is a nontechnical person going to realize that the sysadmin who seems so smart is really stunting the growth of the firm? I’ve even seen cases where sysadmins just flat-out lie about their work and spray a fusillade of jargon anytime they’re questioned about it. This tends to fool the below-average CTO and technical boss as well.
The unfortunate truth is that once someone like this gets power, it’s essentially poison for the entire technical side of the company. To make things worse, the kind of person that would hire someone like this is your average non-technical entrepreneur, who is impressed by jargon and confidence and might not know the difference. So i’ll go over my personal spotting guide to good and bad sysadmins below.
In my consulting and work history, i’ve come across the Bad Sysadmin personality type more times than I’d like. The typical signs are refusal to document work, an excessive amount of jargon, hiding for large amounts of time in obscure projects, and a tendency to look at people as either allies or enemies. A huge indicator is a refusal to verify backups (usually it’s because they lied about making them). These people tend to cost more to a company than they’re worth for the rudimentary technical skills they can employ. Many of them are completely incompetent, and they use these techniques as a smokescreen to hide their deficiencies. Generally, the Bad Sysadmin will be incomprehensible to the average person, mostly because they have no true interest in sharing knowledge. Instead, they prefer to wield their limited knowledge as a weapon in order to appear infallible, instead of using their actual work to justify their existence.
A Good Sysadmin, on the other hand, will be happy to verify or give an update on their work for you. In fact, they’ll be thrilled that anyone’s actually interested in what they do at all. They’ll have strong attention to detail, and a desire to keep things well-organized and documented for their own reference and for others. They’ll typically try to avoid jargon, and will try to explain things in layman’s terms. They might be very proud of things that nobody else understands, but if someone genuinely is interested, they will make the effort to translate. If they don’t know how to do something, they’ll go Google it instead of trying to bullshit you. They won’t be overtly political, instead hoping for someone above to help them with their career. Generally, these sysadmins tend to be deeply involved with their work, and unfortunately are usually less visible in an organization than the noisy, political type. It’s not uncommon to find one Good Sysadmin quietly doing all the work in a group of Bad or just plain Incompetent Sysadmins.
I’ve seen too many of the bad ones, and too few of the good ones in my career. If you’re in a position of technical responsibility, please make sure to cultivate your own sniff test for Bad Sysadmins. It could save you from a long period of IT hell.