Just updated this blog to WordPress 2.5 and the latest K2 nightly. Everything looks good so far. It’s annoying to update a lot of blogs, one at a time, though, when all of them require changes to a bunch of files in the theme… but I endure; this is the third of my blogs to be upgraded, and most of my wrinkles were ironed with the first.

Meanwhile, I don’t want to give details here, but I’m officially on my last week on yet another job. I may stay here for some days afterwards, as the boss has asked me that, since they don’t have a replacement yet, nor I have a place to go right now (though I’m contacting a couple of my contacts). Another attempt at working at home is also an option.

In this job, I had no problems with anyone, and the company isn’t actually “going downhill” like some others I’ve worked at (no, I didn’t cause that! ), but I really didn’t enjoy the work itself, which isn’t anyone’s fault. After 10 years as a sysadmin, I’ve gotten used to a couple of things, such as:

1. almost every repeating task can be automated
2. needs intelligence and creativity, not patience
3. free time, if you’re a fast, efficient worker.

None of these exist in a job like the one I have now. I realize that I may sound “spoiled” (though that’s not my intention), but the idea of having repeating, non-automatable hard work is alien to me (at least since my helpdesk days, last century), and I don’t cope with it very well. I may have been lucky in my past jobs, in fact. A sysadmin can automate almost everything, and any new work is an interesting challenge (no matter how hard), one where you stay at it until late night because, well, it’s a challenge, because “the mountain is there”. A programmer, for instance, has to create and invent. Even an artist (which I’ve never been, but I’ve worked with some) or a writer has to use his or her creativity most of the time, instead of just doing the same old (but tough) things over and over. But many jobs aren’t like this… most of them, in fact, if you don’t restrict yourself to IT. I sometimes wonder how my life would be if I had been born a century ago or so. Well, there would always be science…

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of buying my first laptop. I’ve “had” a couple (including the one I’m typing this in right now), but they were always company-owned ones, and indeed I’ll have to return this one soon. A €600 would be more than enough for “serious” stuff (web browsing, email, blogging, writing, listening to music, watching movies, etc.), but there’s always that little thing called games… so the one I have in mind will cost twice as much. Crazy, I know…

Continuing with my recent “jobs” theme…

I mentioned in the previous post that there are some things I don’t want in a job, and that, if I go looking for one, stating those in advance might potentially save both me and a couple of companies a bit of time. But what are those things? And why?

Assuming you’re curious…

1. No Microsoft technologies. For many people, having a permanent “scapegoat” (“hey, software crashes occasionally, it’s normal… what can anyone do?”) is probably a boon, but I simply despise the idea. If something goes wrong with my work, I want it to be my fault, my responsibility, and fixable (and avoidable in the future) by me. Windows, MS software, and closed source software in general, take too much control away from the user. I need to be able to vouch for my tools.
   Note: I don’t mean that I refuse to ever touch MS software. If I’m in a company, I’m the Unix admin, a Windows server needs something done to it and the Windows admin is at home sick, of course I’ll help. I simply don’t want it as part of my “regular” work.
2. No helpdesk work. I’ve done it in the past, both to calling customers and to co-workers, and didn’t like it. This is not “arrogance” or “I’m too good for it”; I’m simply a technically-inclined, introverted, and sometimes shy person, and, at work, I feel much more at ease with computers than with people.
   Note: as before, I wouldn’t refuse to help a co-worker in need, sporadically. I simply don’t want it as part of the job description. And, yes, “everyone in the IT department does some helpdesk” does qualify as “part of the job description”.
3. No outsourcing. Sorry if I offend someone, but I sincerely believe that outsourcing is an evil, evil thing. As most countries have incredibly collectivist laws which make it less expensive and time-consuming to keep paying an useless employee than firing him (because he “needs” the job, so the law is on his side, and other crap), this has given birth to companies which employ people themselves, pay them a salary, and then “rent” them to real companies, for much more money, just so companies can “fire” a bad worker with a snap of fingers. And companies prefer to pay twice the money, if not more, just so they don’t risk ending up with an “unfirable” parasite. Obviously, I don’t like the concept. In fact, I think it stinks. I’m not saying that there aren’t very nice people as part of outsourcing companies, but, to me, those companies shouldn’t exist in the first place.
   Besides, when working as a “consultant”, you can go one day to a company, another day to another, and I don’t like that. Personal taste. And most companies will treat you as a “stranger”, instead of as part of the “team”. And you won’t have any power to change anything for the better, only do as you’re told. And you’ll have to do reports and more reports. Why spend your life in a situation you hate?

A little clarification, mostly about the first two: you may be thinking that I’m some conceited “prima donna”, that I accept working only in ideal conditions, and expect to do only things I like. That is not the case at all. I’m not naïve; I know that in any job a person, from time to time, has to do something boring or frustrating. But those cases should be the exception, not the rule. If you know in advance you will hate a significant part of a job, why take it at all? It’s not the job you want, and you’re not the person they want, either.

A simple metaphor: let’s say you’re a gardener, and you’re also able to cook, but you hate cooking. Would you take a job as cook? Or, if someone wanted to hire you as a gardener, but then told you that you’d also have to cook for the entire family every day. Would you still want the job, in that situation?

I think not… and it’s the same scenario, here.

For some reason, after the last post about my disillusion with having been a sysadmin for about a decade, I’ve been thinking about past jobs, job searching, interviews, and so on, and there’s a point I’ve never seen addressed anywhere, and about which I’d like to have some reader opinions. Yes, that means you.

During the last two times I searched for a job (in 2000 and 2004, if I remember correctly), there were several times when I went to a job interview, and during the first 5 minutes of that interview, it became painfully obvious that I wasn’t what they wanted… or that the job included something I didn’t want as part of it… or both. This happened more than once, too.

Some were obvious cases of they not having looked at my CV at all (which is apparently increasingly common [link in Portuguese]), as nothing else explains why they’d ask a guy whose CV lists mostly Unix and open source software skills to do helpdesk for Windows desktops! But, in other cases, it was something that a CV typically doesn’t say, such as “no helpdesk work” or “no outsourcing”.

So, at the time, I talked to friends and family about it, and told them that I wondered if it wouldn’t be better if, when applying for a job, I stated in front (in the original letter / email, or as part of the CV) that there were several things that would make me refuse a job offer (I’ll write about them in a future post).

“No!”, everyone replied. “Are you crazy? If they read something like that, they’ll dismiss you then and there! You can’t show such arrogance when applying for a new job! You need to show humility, and readiness to do anything they require from you!”

I don’t know if this is common in other countries, such as the United States, but here in Portugal we still tend to see a job as a “favor” the employer does to the employee. That’s why such extreme humility — almost like we are beggars — is expected.

But I don’t see this as arrogance at all. In fact, it is in the company’s interest as well as mine: it potentially avoids wasting their time. It’s like a filter in a search; you exclude — or allow others to exclude — the results you already know you don’t want. Is this “arrogant”?

I have worked as a sysadmin (mostly Unix / Linux) for most of my professional life (not right now, though), and I’ve been meaning to write a few thoughts about it for a while.

My experience is that working as a sysadmin is, to me, interesting and fulfilling on a technical level, but ultimately disappointing and frustrating on a career and personal level. Why is that?

Let’s say you’re a good, competent sysadmin, and you’ve just joined a new company. During the first few days, you get acquainted with the company, the department, the sysadmin team (if any), the network, and the servers. Soon, any technical problems the company suffers from become apparent. Maybe a particular service is too slow, there have been security problems in the past, a server or application crashes often, there is some network congestion, that server’s logs tend to fill up the entire drive and need to be deleted from time to time, and so on. Or maybe you spot a need for something the company doesn’t have: a caching proxy server, an anti-spam / anti-virus email gateway, etc..

So, you get to work on those problems. Some software upgrades here, some tuning there, some cron entries here, some scripting there, some changes to the network, and so on. In months — maybe weeks, if the company is small — all the problems are mostly solved, and everything runs smoothly. Sure, you still have to reset users’ passwords (they keep losing the Post-Its forgetting them), keep software versions up to date (at least concerning bug fixes or newfound security holes), and, since you’re not dead and therefore haven’t stopped learning, maybe you later realize how a redesign or change of some particular server or software application can make things even better.

But, for the most part… most of your job is done. In the Unix world, with a decent knowledge of scripting and a good deal of experience, you can make your servers almost administer themselves, and you will be warned (by scripts) of potential problems in advance, so that they never actually happen. So… what now?

Now, you have a problem… especially if you’re an honest person. Because managers — and this has been my experience almost everywhere I’ve been — still tend to measure an employee’s work — and worth — by how busy he looks. Many people, then, simply pretend to be busy all the time (“change your email password? OK, I’ll get back to you next Monday.”), but such an attitude may be repulsive to you (it is to me). Explaining things to your manager doesn’t really work; even if he begins to understand, his own bosses won’t, and, if some head must roll, better yours than his…

So, after solving the company’s problems, and assuming you refuse to act busy when you’re not, what next? Well, you’ll get a reputation for laziness, for not “working” all the time, when everyone else does it (even if they’re just faking it). You’ll probably get assigned, in addition to your “proper” work, all the dumb, repetitive, non-sysadmin (and therefore non-scriptable) tasks — which, since you have free time, you probably can’t refuse, or at least feel you can’t. Any raise or promotion will certainly not go to you, but to your “hard-working” co-workers, who are always so “busy” and have so much “work” that they stay at work every day after 6, that they can never do a task “right now”, but only in a week’s time, and that, even their own results are much inferior to yours, it’s you who’re not “dependable”, “dedicated”, or “competent”.

Which is why I think it’s time for a career change. I currently work at home, in personal projects, but I’m probably going to look for a new job soon (for the extra money, and for learning something new “on the job”), and I’m thinking of programming, probably in PHP. I love the idea of creating something, instead of just making existing things work. And of (hopefully) being measured by results, not by how busy I look. I’m not a PHP “expert” (far from it), but I learn quickly, and I love to learn — even at 32 years old. Stagnation is always bad (though it seems that’s what most people seek in a job, especially in Portugal, oddly enough — learn a couple of skills, then do exactly that for the rest of your life), and, paraphrasing Duke Leto Atreides, a person needs new experiences… and new challenges.

This essay, Working at Microsoft, from a guy who’s been working there since 1999, is, IMO, quite intriguing.

The guy (who at the beginning says he’s mostly a Mac guy, though he never “hated” MS) says mostly positive things about them, except about middle managers, who, according to him, are mostly techs who were promoted and have no management skills at all.

Another interesting bit:

It’s hard for people who don’t work at Microsoft’s main campus to understand just how unreal the experience of working there can become. Some employees forget that most of the world doesn’t have broadband wireless networking, high-end consumer electronics, luxury vehicles, and enough money that they don’t need to live on a budget. Some employees spend so much time using Microsoft products, that they forget about the competition and/or lose touch with typical customers’ needs.

I don’t want to re-post such a huge article here, but if you work in IT, you’ll probably find the story called The Sacrificial Worker (written by yours truly) familiar.

Why is it that IT managers, and companies in general, will put up with anything from software that costs millions of euros / dollars (including insecurity, instability, lack of certain features, user unfriendliness, etc.), but refuse to even consider an equivalent piece of open source software, free (as in beer), unless it’s absolutely perfect in all those respects?

If a piece of software was free and is almost perfect, but has a problem, “we must replace it”. If it did cost millions, “we must learn to live with those problems, and hope they’re solved in the next version”.

Morons.

While reading some reader responses to a Microsoft guy’s rant disguised as an “editorial” about OpenDocument, I found a phrase that was almost… shocking, in the way it simplifies and clears a truth that many people ignore or simply don’t understand.

“Familiarity with inefficiency is no excuse for perpetuation of inefficiency.”

Unfortunately, many people (most of them wearing suits and ties) fail completely to understand that fact, and believe otherwise: that everyone in the company is completely stupid and incapable of learning anything new (I wonder why they keep those people employed, then…), and so, the only factor to be considered in what software to use is “what we’ve been using before”. No matter how bad, unstable, insecure, slow, inefficient it is. “It’s what we know”.

Imbeciles.

Just like a previous post in this blog was only partially appropriate for Way of the Mind, one of my other blogs, this new article there, A job: trade, favor or duty? is more philosophical than technological, so it’s only partially appropriate here. But if the subject matter interests you, feel free to read it.

I’ve talked about this subject before (in the “keeping busy” entries), and I think I mentioned this in passing, but I believe that this is an important point, and deserves its own article.

My theory (which observation seems to validate) is that the better a system administrator is, the more free time he will eventually have.

Many people (including managers, team leaders, etc.), unfortunately, equate “free time” or “not working hard all the time” with “laziness”, and wrongly believe that a good worker is one who is working hard all the time – if he extends it to after work hours and weekends, even better.

Unfortunately, if they thought a couple of minutes about it, they might spot the huge, glaring error in such “logic”…

1. You know the “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” saying? In systems administration, it’s similar. An average sysadmin fixes a problem. A good sysadmin not only fixes it, but he understands what happened, what caused it, and solves the underlying cause so that it doesn’t happen again in the future. Ideally, every problem only happens once.
2. Many (though not all) sysadmin jobs can be either partially or completely automated. Doing so requires skill and experience, something an average sysadmin may not have. But it saves a huge lot of effort and time. An average sysadmin works, a good one scripts, so that most of the work performs itself.
3. Systems administration is not a particularly “hard” work (though it’s a very specialized one), like, for instance, farming, in which effort and perseverance are the most important qualities. Instead, what makes a good sysadmin is: intelligence, quick learning, imagination, and, above all, experience. Those qualities tend to make a good sysadmin a very fast worker.
4. A sysadmin doesn’t just solve problems; he also researches, tests and implements new things. True. But even those don’t tend to take up all available time (except at particular situations, such as the final part of a project), because no “sane” company replaces their systems every month (unfortunately, there are a lot of “insane” companies out there, but that’s another story).
5. Unlike an average sysadmin, a good one has very efficient monitoring and warning systems. An average sysadmin tends to be “warned” of problems by the users – “this service is down”, “I can’t access my email account”, and so on. A good sysadmin, however, was warned about that abnormally growing log file a long time before it was even close to taking up all free space in its partition. And he fixed the cause of that growth long before it affected any services.
6. Managers tend to love a worker who works 7 days a week, stays in after hours, and so on. But what does that mean? Either that that worker is slow and inefficient, or that he’s doing the work of 3 persons or more. If the former, they should reconsider his value; if the latter, he’s the one who should reconsider his employment…
7. A good sysadmin is a master of efficiency and time saving. As I said, he scripts, he automates, he solves problems “once and for all”. He investigates and deploys his own tools for quick remote administration, which are much faster than going to the physical location of a server, for instance.

See the pattern?

Unfortunately, there’s a problem here: visibility. A good sysadmin is like an efficient police force. If citizens constantly see the police running after criminals, in spectacular car chases, they’ll probably be impressed, but a really good police force would mean that most crimes would be prevented in some way. Instead of a police which goes after criminals, there would be an apparent lack of crime. Sadly, that tends to make people start to believe that maybe we don’t need such a well-financed, well-staffed police force…

Here, it’s the same thing. Think of the crash from a rapidly growing log file I mentioned above. With an average sysadmin, it’s “I can’t access my mail!”, then he goes, deletes the file, restarts the service, and it’s working again. With a good sysadmin, nothing would have happened. Nobody would have noticed anything. So, they start to think that maybe that sysadmin doesn’t do a lot around here… maybe he isn’t pulling his weight.

That’s ridiculous, though – that one may have to do his job worse than he’s capable of, just so that people notice his work. It’s something I refuse to do. But maybe some “self-marketing” would be useful – like, when you solve a problem before it happens, you tell your superiors about it. It’s a bit absurd… but I think it’s better, and more honest, than the alternative (doing a bad job on purpose).

(NOTE: reading part 1 first may be a good idea. )

To explore the “acting busy” vs. “doing actual work” theme, I want to share (without the sordid details, of course) a situation I’ve been in.

A few years ago, I worked as a sysadmin in a company which had about 20-30 Linux servers, and about the same number of Windows (NT 4 and 2000, at the time) servers. There were two separate teams of sysadmins, one for each type of servers, though both teams had the same boss, and worked in the same room.

The two teams, however, had a very different philosophy of work…

First, except for the initial server installations, almost all the work of the Linux team was made remotely, using ssh. Except for coffee/lunch/toilet breaks, we were at our desks for most of the time. On the other hand, the Windows team did their work inside the datacenter, physically on the servers (at the time, remote desktop utilities were less used than they are today).

When the Linux team encountered a problem in a server, we would figure out what the problem was, what caused it, and how to prevent it from happening again in the future – most problems, indeed, only happened once. The Windows guys, however, were of the philosophy that the only thing that mattered was to quickly make the services available again – by rebooting. If it happened every week – or, indeed, every day, tough. They had, they believed, to be getting paid for something, right?

The result of this was that we Linux guys were, most of the time, calmly sitting on our desks, and had a lot of free time (which we sometimes used for research, for staying informed about our field of work, for trying out new solutions on test servers, and so on – but which we also used, sometimes, simply for resting, or for browsing non-work sites). The Windows guys, on the other hand, were often inside the datacenter, most or all of them at the same time, putting out the latest “fire” – which would likely repeat itself in a couple of days, since they never attacked the cause, only rebooted the servers. And when it happen, they made sure they looked very alarmed – and that everyone saw them (there were other non-sysadmin teams in the same room) running to the datacenter to solve the latest crash.

The Windows servers had a lot of downtime, but the Linux ones’ was almost nil.

Now… guess which team the bosses preferred. Which team was seen as “competent” and “hard working”. Which team got promotions, pay raises, and shiny new laptops.

I don’t know if I’ve been unlucky in most of the jobs I had, or if it’s like this everywhere, but, if you work in IT, does it look to you as if your boss doesn’t really care about your achieving objectives, being productive, having everything working smoothly, tasks being done quickly and efficiently, etc. – he only cares about whether you’re busy all the time or not?

Or, to put it in another way: were you hired, and are you being paid to do your job, perform your assigned tasks efficiently, keep everything running smoothly, anticipate problems and make sure they don’t happen, optimize what can be optimized, solve problems as they appear, help users with problems, and so on… or were you hired to be busy 7-8 hours a day?

And if you, for some reason aren’t busy for all those hours (because you already did your tasks, because you work quickly due to your experience (a problem you’ve seen before is usually solved much faster than a new one), because you’re good at anticipating problems, and so made sure, long ago, that most of them simply don’t happen, because you refuse to do what everyone else seems to do (act busy, or “extend” their tasks so they take all your available time, or simply pretend to work)… does your boss treat you as a bad worker? As if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do?

In what strange way does having employees busy (or looking busy) all the time benefit a company? None, I believe. So why do bosses, managers, even CEOs insist on it so much? Why do they judge employees by it, instead of by the work they actually do?

If an employee works faster than most, he or she shouldn’t be punished for it by. Neither should they be punished for being honest.

What are your experiences on this? I’d really want to know if I’ve just been unlucky in about half a dozen different jobs, or if it’s like this everywhere.

Welcome to the first article in the freshly created “Work” category.

The first question: have you ever been in a situation where your boss attempts to direct your career – probably in a different direction than that you yourself have chosen?

Basically, suppose that there are several work-related things you like to do, that you really enjoy doing, and, so, you look for a job where you’ll be asked (and paid) to do exactly that. So far, so good. But… some time afterwards (maybe months, or even a couple of years), you increasingly feel that your boss is attempting to steer you away from the things you enjoy, and towards something you either hate, or simply doesn’t have anything to do with you.

You’re a reasonable person, so you’re aware that you won’t ever have a “perfect job” in which everything you do is something that challenges, stimulates or fascinates you – that there are some “menial”, or boring, or simply unpleasant jobs to be done, from time to time. That’s normal, and you were prepared from that from the beginning. But now, you’re finding out that those tasks are increasing in number and length, and that what you really love doing, what you were hired to do in the first place, is getting rarer and rarer.

If it was because the company’s requirements have changed – maybe they don’t really need anyone to do what you like doing anymore – the solution is obvious: move. (if you have kids to feed or something, move after you get hired to something better, of course.) But what if it’s not the company, but just your boss?

Talking to him is the obvious thing to do, right? But what if he refuses to understand? What if he treats you as if you’re a “spoiled” or arrogant worker who believes he must always do things he enjoys, and nothing else? What if he truly believes that he’s “helping” you, by making you learn new skills (even though they’re things you’ve already tried — and hated) – possibly even more “marketable” skills, like project management, or drawing Visio diagrams, or administration of some some software you dislike?

The solution again seems to involve “quitting”. But, have you been in a similar situation? Do you believe that it’s possible to make your boss appreciate your skills, your passion for your real work, and stop trying to steer you into a career you’d hate?

(this article was originally written for, and appeared in, one of my other blogs, Way of the Mind, but, being related to the kind of bosses us techs often have to put up with, it is also appropriate for this blog, IMO)

As a Unix/Linux sysadmin, I’ve worked at many places, compared to many people I know, who have been where they are for 5 years or more. I’ve done several kinds of jobs (thankfully, most of them related to my skills), and met many colleagues… and bosses.

And I tend to have a problem with the latter.

Not real “conflicts”, I don’t usually have them. But I’ve been in several places (and, indeed, am in one now) where everything would be almost perfect – colleagues, environment, the work itself – except for one imbecile who ruins everything – and who happens to be my boss.

For examples of what these bosses are like, see this entry in my wiki. But, in short, they take all the joy out of our work, because we quickly learn that, by being good, they don’t think they hired a good worker – instead, they see us as a threat. So they try to smother us with stupid, useless tasks, like making reports (and reports about reports – a colleague of mine is now doing one, and she surely is more pacient than I am).

I don’t have a solution for this. Somehow, these people are almost never fired, no matter how much they hurt the company, no matter how many competent people quit because of their bosses’ stupidity and have to be replaced (which costs more money). It seems that there’s almost never a competent boss – that almost sounds like a contradiction in terms.

So, a few years ago, I “invented” a simple test, that should be followed in every company, but unfortunately never is.

The test is just this: compare the boss (or candidate for the position), in terms of benefit to the company, to a potted plant.

No, really, I’m serious.

A potted plant costs:

• a vase
• some earth
• some sunlight
• periodic watering

A boss costs:

• a relatively big salary
• paid vacations
• possibly, a company credit card
• possibly, a company car
• a health plan
• an office
• a secretary
• a company cell phone
• several paid courses
• business trips expenses

So far, everything is way to the advantage of the potted plant, right? Now, let’s consider what each gives us.

A potted plant gives:

• oxygen
• improves room aesthetics (that is, it looks nice)

While a boss…?

A completely neutral boss, who did nothing, either good or bad, would still lose completely to the potted plant – sunlight and water are quite cheap, while a boss can cost thousands or millions per year to a company.

To compensate for that huge disadvantage, a boss would have to contribute a lot. Good leadership, organization, project management, wise and cost-effective choices, and the ability to motivate the workers, even during the worst periods. That just might balance things, and make the choice between having a potted plant or a boss NOT be an obvious choice.

But what about a boss who actually HARMS the company? Who makes stupid decisions, which cost millions and then don’t work or are cancelled midways? Who makes the working environment hell instead of pleasant and inspiring? Who refuses to give the smallest raise to the employees, but uses company money to buy himself cars and to go on golf tours with his pals? Who makes decisions not on what is best for the company, but on what increases his power base? Who sees brilliant employees as a threat and does everything in his power so they hate their job and quit?

Me, I’d take a potted plant every day.

So, does your boss pass The Potted Plant Test?