Re: LISA...how good

[Tom Limoncelli <plts.org">tal]

Elizabeth Zwicky <zwickycrash.neu.sgi.com> writes about the value
of going to a LISA conference:
> If you've never had the experience of being in the same space with
> dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other system administrators, you owe
> it to yourself to try it; even if the tutorials and the talks don't
> help you, the discussion at coffee breaks is an education in itself. 
>...

This is an excellent lead-in to something I've been wanting to bring up
for a while.

What is the difference between an amateur and a professional?  I'm not
talking whether or not you are paid, but whether or not you act
amateurish or professionally and whether you are treated with the
appropriate amount of respect by the people around you, the people you
work for, and society.

At a recent retreat, a friend brought up the notion that in her field
(psychiatry) extra schooling is required to become professionalized,
and what she discovered was that 70% of her professionalization was
from being with other people going through the same "professionalization"
process.  Growing together, maturing together, watching their teachers;
they all learned how to walk, talk, dress, act like a "professional".
By the time their schooling was done, they were "professionals" (the
social definition, at least).

Hearing that really got me thinking.  One of the goals of SAGE is to
get more respect for system administration as a profession.

Yet, we have no schools that let's us interact with others for years
before we hit the "real world".  In fact, it is quite the opposite.  I
think the term "on the job training" must have been created to describe
system administrators.

Sysadmins usually work in isolation.  There may be one per department,
one per area, etc.  If you are the sysadmin for a bunch of chemists at
a medical research company, there is no one you can turn to and ask for
technical opinions or even talk about better ways to manage your time,
do major overhauls, etc.  The nearest thing you have is Usenet, which
many sysadmins don't have access to.  Even if you do, it can be
difficult to explain an entire 10-net, 100-machine network so that you
can ask, "What's the best way to configure automounter in this
situation?".  If you do, you're likely to get 50 replies saying, "Ugh,
I hate automounter.  It sucks, dude!"  Other technical questions might
be difficult to ask because you are skirting around with not exposing
proprietary information.

So, what do we sysadmins have instead?

We have LISA/SAGE/SANS/Usenix conferences.  They are our universities
where we interact with others, learn from scholars and get sage
advice.

In that respect, these conferences go a long way to reaching the goals
of SAGE.

However, they are only a couple times year; not everyone can go to them;
they are expensive and require you to leave work for long periods of time.

$GROUPNAME (a SAGE-like organization in New Jersey... the birthplace of
Unix) has "cluster groups" every other month.  We pick restaurants
around the state (one in the south, one in the central, etc.) and we
hold social gatherings simultaneously.  Sometimes we pick a theme and
report back what each group did with their theme.  For example, once we
had each group come up with a list of what is their most used publicly-
available software.  We all learned a lot from each other at that
meeting, and later it was interesting to compare what the groups listed
in common.*

The cluster groups provide a social space for system administrators.
Some people role-model good behavior while others learn.  Sometimes
it's like "Usenet-live" with a 10 people talking at once about how they
switched configured automounter, but often we talk about meta-topics
like how to manage your time, your users, your manager, etc.

How difficult is it to form a cluster group?  Not very.  We gain members
by posting to the appropriate mailing lists and newsgroups.  We do all the
arrangements via email.  The most important thing is to have the locations
be somewhat consistent (so people only get lost their first time) and the
time/date consistent (so people can place for it).  Best of all, there can't
be any turf wars because the hope is to have many going on in each part
of the state.  If a turf war starts, start an additional cluster!

What about the future?

Well, I don't think that cluster groups and conferences alone will
change our industry.  The SAGE Job Descriptions Booklet, salary
surveys, and other tools are also needed.  Maybe someday it will be
expected that sysadmins will have some kind of advanced degree.  Then
again, the most accurate way to predict the future is to be the
one that creates it.


--tal

Footnote:
* -- To see the results of these discussions:
echo get groupname 94-04-21-central-jersey-cluster-report | mail majordomoplts.org
echo get groupname 94-04-21-south-jersey-cluster-report | mail majordomoplts.org

-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- talplts.org (home) -- talbig.att.com (work)

              "I guess some days there just aren't enough rocks."
                                           -Forrest Gump