Sysadmins Generation NEXT

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to talk with representatives of a small integrator in Moscow as part of a joint project. Including, for the sake of interest, I spoke with the guys, who were called the system administrators department. The average age is 26 years, many have 3-4 certificates from Microsoft or even Oracle. Engaged in the billing system of one very large Russian operator. This is the front part, solid, but there is another, shady side, which is usually hidden from prying eyes and about which I learned only because I spoke with the workers. This part most fully characterizes the dialogue that I had with this “administrator”:

(I) - Imagine, Alexey, a sysadmin in one friendly office has been unable to set up automatic shutdown servers for two weeks in case of power loss for two weeks.
(admin) - Why disconnect them, then?
(I) - In the sense of? Well, the electricity was gone, the UPS keeps the power on for a finite time, then it turns off.
(admin) - Well, I think that the server should work constantly. No need to turn it off automatically.
(I) - What, sorry? How would you solve this problem? The power supply was lost (the builders chopped the cable) in the whole building, there is a UPS, but they keep for 20-30 minutes, then they are disconnected. How to be?
(admin) - Well, let UPS send me a notification by mail or SMS that the power has been lost, and I’ll already be thinking whether to disconnect or not.
(I) - And even in three nights let him send? And even if you climb a mountain somewhere in the Alps?

At this, our dialogue ended, because this mega-certified “admin” turned out to be just “Pavlov's dog”, taught what buttons to press. As soon as he was confronted with the simplest, but unfamiliar task, he instantly disappeared and was lost in three birch trees.

I remembered this story because I recently searched for a sysadmin in a small organization. The office is small, only 60 people and needed a competent administrator, with a head capable of independently solving a bunch of non-standard tasks. Money was offered quite normally (for Moscow) and I did not see any particular difficulties with the search. How wrong I was.
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I will not mention any resumes sent to me. This is generally a separate topic for the article. The simplest example of a fairly frequent resume:

Company Name: “Vasya Pupkin and Sons” LLC
Position: system administrator
Responsibilities: engaged in system administration.

I dismissed such scribes immediately. Like many others, in very many ways. Sometimes it took me 5-10 seconds to evaluate a resume. But again, the topic of errors in the resume of IT people deserves a separate article in general, which I may write a little later. This time I wanted to talk about direct interviews and reactions.

As a result, out of hundreds of resumes sent, I invited about 15 people for interviews. They had correctly and beautifully designed CVs, you could get through to them (by the way, if you are looking for a job, indicate the method of communication, which is guaranteed to work) and they haven’t started to moan “phooo, users ... I don’t like them so much. ... ". 15 people. To all of them, I asked only two simple tasks for logic and attentiveness. In one, it was proposed to deploy anti-virus protection on some servers, in the second, to choose a backup method. Since the conditions were very blurry, the candidate had to turn on the brain and make the right technical decision, and I watched as he suffers from the situation. So, about 12-13 people out of 15 got up in a stupor even at the stage “put antivirus on DC or not.” Many said, “Why on the server antivirus? Only an extra load. And another, when I mentioned for some reason Windows NT 3.51, said that "there is no such OS, NT was only 4.0". Again, these are people with a good job history who call themselves "system administrators." Many have certificates from MS, 1C and other “Bauman courses”. And when the fifth or sixth candidate struck me with the phrase "well, you do not set conditions, you ask me something technical," then I remembered my experience with the administrator of that integrator.

When I started to work professionally in 1993, the “system administrator” meant “system administrator”, a person who systematizes chaos and builds a foundation for the entire IT structure: builds a network, sets up a server, plans work logic. Later, this concept was divided into "network engineer", "server engineer" and other "engineers", and the "system administrator" slipped into "helpdesk" (talking about Russia). But now it turns out that this is not even a helpdesk, these are the little parrots who were given certificates in various government offices or integrators, taught how to count the network mask without a calculator, taught which buttons to press (especially Microsoft loves it) - and released to the world. After that, they can work only in the same McDonald's from IT, which many integrators of Russia are.

Frankly, I am very sorry for this trend. This offense mixed with disappointment inspired me to write this article. I hope that it will be read by at least a few young people who have not yet crippled the psyche of the integrator, and in the future they will be able to become real specialists, and not scientists monkeys.

Have a nice day everyone.