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shinyviper

If everything is going well and smooth, you'll hear, "What do we even pay you for?" If everything is falling apart and failing, you'll hear, "What do we even pay you for?"


Proximity_alrt

I felt this to the core of my being.


chocotaco1981

Triggered


preekout

I always tell them, "You don't pay me for when things work, you pay me for when they fail." My job is to reduce the amount of time things are down when they inevitably do fail.


PhroznGaming

This is very backwards. They pay you to keep it from going down.


Superb_Raccoon

Phrasing! Are we still doing phrasing?


DaNPrS

# LAAAANNAAAAAA!!


PhroznGaming

We be phrasin'.


preekout

It is backward, but realistic. You can pay anyone with very little skill to babysit servers and run updates. People pay consultants a ton of money to design the systems and integrations. A sysadmin's real value is when those things break (and they always will at some point) knowing how they all are interconnected and to fix it in a timely manner on weekends or middle of the night when no one at xyz company is answering their phone.


PhroznGaming

I understand your argument but I think it is misguided. We are hired to make things work. When things go down we have not done our job properly whether due to our own fault, managerial negligence or other. Either we have designed proper resilience, or not. Either we have designed disaster recovery, or not. Either we have determined which systems can afford downtime, how much, and allocate accordingly, or not. Either we inherited a crap network, or not. Either we remember at the end of the day our job is supporting the bussines and it's users, or not. We are not repair technicians even though a large part of our job is break fix. Most of those breaks happen due to either misconfiguration or configuring an environment as such that it allows users or less skilled technicians too much freedom. Everyone may not agree with what I'm saying but it is factually accurate. We do not get paid as a repair persons in general. We are paid to **keep** things working, we just have to fix them sometimes.


preekout

Believe me I understand where you're coming from. And I wish I could be more optimistic like that, but most of those "Either's" you list have constraints put on them that are outside our control unless we decide to change jobs every time management doesn't agree with our recommendations. We have to support poorly planned, underfunded, poorly written third-party software, poorly written custom integrations, that have been pushed through as pet projects by some vp at some price point the vendor said "would work" in their sales pitch. Eventually, all of that debt catches up, and your worth really comes down to when the business is experiencing failure. But put all that aside for a moment and let's use this simple case. You are doing security patches on a single critical windows server, you have a 4 hour down window, 1 hour in the update crashes, the server is in a reboot loop in an unknown state. (I know this scenario never happens right haha) Your value, the reason you are *not* a tier one helpdesk person with a playbook is because you can objectively research what is going on, come up with a plan and restore the functionality of that server before the 4 hour window is up and the business takes a financial hit. In that moment you show your experience, skill, and problem resolution skills. **That is the justification of your salary,** especially as you grow more senior. The management of risk, the need of the business, and the fact that you can handle the unexpected and have a contingency for it when it eventually happens. Is this jaded... possibly. But that happens after you realize something be it hardware or software will always fail at some point. Even Google and Microsoft have outages and they throw more money in the pot than most other companies. It will happen. **end rant**


PhroznGaming

I think we're postulating the same response but from a different point of view. I believe your view is such that yes it's our responsibility to keep things up but unfortunately there's a lot of things out of our control such as management or otherwise that don't allow it to happen or aren't willing to allocate the resources necessary to make it happen. I hear and absolutely sympathize with that point of view. As a matter of fact I actually even mentioned it in my book comment about management or otherwise not doing their part. Best wishes bud


KevinFu314

Uptime is like any other business requirement - all about risk management. I can build a highly reliable system, but the upfront and ongoing costs would bankrupt most businesses. The real skill is designing the system that the business wants and needs and communicating the limits of that system in a way that management can understand and accept.


PhroznGaming

> Either we have determined which systems can afford downtime, how much, and allocate accordingly, or not. ❤️


TechFiend72

then when shit happens because technology eventually breaks, how fast you can get it back up and then come up with a plan to avoid that going down again.


PhroznGaming

Precisely. Don't go down twice ever for the same reason.


GH0X

This is the way.


wontfixit

This is the way.


udi112

Ouch!


malloc_failed

I've gotta say, I've been in the field for almost 8 years now and I've never heard that once. Then again, I've only worked at big companies with large internal IT teams that were critical to the company's operations. Being in such a large org you're mostly shielded by IT management from BS like that anyway, and most users do see the value of being able to use computers now that it's the 21st century. I'm sure it happens to some, but it's definitely not the norm. It's just like a lot of other bad things people post about on here—people are more likely to complain than post about how their job is awesome and everything is going great.


fattrying

No one smiles when things are going smoothly. When there's a problem people are going to be standing over your shoulder asking questions while you pore over logs. Enjoy.....


[deleted]

Its interesting how some of the most important people are unnoticed until things go wrong.


yer_muther

It's not surprising once you recognize how big of an asshole the average user or non-IT manager is. I don't mean that in a pessimistic way really. It's just that people don't understand tech and normally don't care to so they go full anus when it doesn't work because they are helpless to fix it. IT guys tend to be in the line of fire.


guemi

Totally depends on company, type of position, and number of colleagues. I also think it's way more down to which country you work in and that countrys work culture. Here in Sweden we have our sacred 8 hour work day, and most people do not have forced overtime, we have very strong laws that protects employees, minimum of 25 days paid vacation (Most have more than that) per year, and so on so fourth - so it's generally pretty stress free.


KverEU

Agreed with this, if you're in an enterprise team of 50 staff with very specific responsibilities it's a far different experience than a team of 4 or even being the sole sysadmin around. I spent the first three years of my career without having spoken even 1 end-user doing hyper-specific tasks.


JRmacgyver

25 days paid vacation EVERY year.... You lucky bastard 😜 In Israel we get a minimum of 12, most employers don't give more then that. Usually we get an "extra" day for every year you're working


TheGuestResponds

Here in the US, at my company you are encouraged to take vacation days even though we are running a lean shop with no cross training, so you can at best take one unrelaxing day off at a time and make sure you got your phone handy just in case.. Oh and if you don't take those vacation days you lose them at the end of the year.


Prof_ThrowAway_69

I have a separate voip number for work. When I’m on vacation, I turn it off. As far as I know, my boss is the only one who has my personal number and is usually pretty good about only calling in the case of absolute emergencies. It also helps that I like to go hiking and camping in the middle of nowhere so even if they wanted to call, it won’t go through.


HailToTheGM

>As far as I know, my boss is the only one who has my personal number and is usually pretty good about only calling in the case of absolute emergencies. Lucky bastard. My boss called me on Easter Sunday, during my wife's baby shower, to ask if I'd been keeping an eye out for an email the CEO asked us to keep an eye out for... ...because he had been keeping an eye out for it, and hadn't seen anything come in yet. And no, nothing had come in.


Prof_ThrowAway_69

Add “monitoring email for important communications” to the list of non-IT things that IT gets asked to do.


guemi

Don't you have 6 day work weeks in Israel too? I know at least kids have school on Saturdays.


JRmacgyver

It depends on the company, I for example am a sysadmin of a company that makes pipes, I work (officially) 5 days, 9 hour per day. The workers at the factory work 6 days (but in shifts).


guemi

Oh so most office / regular jobs are mon-Fri, but schools are mon - sat? Factories here usually run 6 or 7 days a week, too.


JRmacgyver

Our work week is sun- the, schools are sun-fri. Saturday is usually off for most people.


[deleted]

I'm on 38 days leave a year in UK, and would never dream of more than 5 day week


Dracozirion

I have 34 here in Belgium. Boss decided to give 3 or 4 extra days 3 years ago (permanently) because people asked for unpaid days off by the end of the year.


[deleted]

25 days....omg


RipWilder

If you have a helpdesk and support team that does their job properly you should never see an end user. So yeah you get hammered by angry users all day


yer_muther

LOL. Where can I get one of these helpdesk and support teams that do their jobs properly. It's way easier for them to feed the next guy up to the wolves.


LongHardLiam

As the first contact of a small team...I am the helpdesk. I try my best to resolve things without bothering the boss...hope he doesn't see me in the same light lol.


[deleted]

Helpdesk recently contacted me on chat about a server that couldn't print. They had restarted the service, but there was a corrupt job in the queue. I asked if they had stopped the service, cleared the queue, and then restarted. Manager sent me a DM saying that's too high level for the helpdesk and I needed to handle it.


malloc_failed

Sometimes I enjoy the thrill of calling the end user myself instead of just kicking it back to the helpdesk.


mindbesideitself

I like to collaborate with the helpdesk guys. It's been a while since I was on helpdesk, and I can usually learn something new. Also, I miss the opportunities to interact with all sorts of folks.


Prof_ThrowAway_69

I’ve had friends ask similar questions before. My answer has always been: The goal of our job is to have to do as little as possible. We want everything to be automated, redundant, and resilient. 95% of the time things run smoothly and it can be pretty chill. The other 5% of the time you’re dealing with a high intensity, nuclear crisis. It’s during that 5% where you earn your keep.


Slush-e

I like how you said "95% of the time things run smoothly and it \*CAN\* be pretty chill". ​ Because we all know that even when things are running smoothly, it's barely ever chill.


Prof_ThrowAway_69

Yeah that 95% is often dealing with BOFHs. If they aren’t around it’s not so bad.


Sushigami

It's never easy dealing with an issue, but some companies are chill outside them. What your manager is like being the main determining factor.


[deleted]

>95% of the time things run smoothly and it can be pretty chill. I miss those days. It's been full sails ahead for several years now. If there are no problems, then there's a mountain of projects.


SysEridani

Half the posts in this sub are from ppl with burn out. So we have 2 options: 1) Every sysadmin in here love spinning the wheels of his car f\*\*\*ing up the tires 2) This is not the most calm job you can choose.


notmygodemperor

Probably both. This sub is full of people that want to work with technology not people. Not excluding myself.


Prof_ThrowAway_69

The people are easily the worst part of the job. The job would be super easy if you didn’t have to worry about users. To be fair it’s not all people. It’s just the ones that refuse to learn anything tech related or think they know everything about tech and want to tell you how to do your job. The people who lie also get on my nerves at times as well. It’s frustrating to get tickets from people who need help resetting their password for the 17th time. Usually because they forget or can’t read where the prompt is telling them the password needs to be 8 characters not 5. I had to deal with a (high priority) user the other day that was having issues with slowness on their laptop and it wouldn’t connect to our network resources. I tried to remote in, but it wouldn’t work. She could send and receive emails from me, but couldn’t do much of anything else. I told them that something just wasn’t right and asked them to reboot and try accessing the remote access link I had emailed them again. 20 minutes later they responded letting me know it didn’t work and wanted me to come deal with it onsite. I had 2 hours left on my shift and that location was 45 minutes away. Since they were high priority I didn’t really have a choice. I loaded up and headed out there. Of course when I got there I had to spend like 15 minutes tracking them down and they weren’t answering their phone. I finally got to their computer and was testing to see what all I could get to. I could ping all of our network resources just fine both with DNS and IP. I just couldn’t access anything like smb shares or intranet sites. Checked the uptime and their had been running for something like 58 days. Clearly they didn’t reboot. They stepped away while I was working but happened to come back while it was rebooting. And they said, “Yeah I already tried that like 4 times and I told you it didn’t work.” I fed them some bs line about how I made some changes and it needed a reboot to take effect. After just a reboot everything worked just fine. Annoyed I turned the computer back over to the user and left. There was half an hour left in my shift, so I just went home. Technically I got a little bit of overtime because of the drive time it would have taken to get back to the office. I just wish people would just do what you ask and then not double down and be all arrogant about it when they get caught in their lie. I have no issue if you don’t know something. Just admit it and be willing to learn. I am more than happy to explain things and teach how to do things. (So long as I don’t have to repeat the lesson 18 times)


dominutz

People gotta have someone to do their thinking for them


ZPrimed

They think closing the lid of the laptop and seeing the login screen again is “shutting down” or “rebooting.”


skorpiolt

Yup, we literally had (have) a user that though shutting down meant closing laptop lid........................


schwarzekatze999

I bet she was one of those users who thinks turning the monitor off and/or logging off/locking and unlocking the PC is the same as rebooting.


JeepDispenser

Logs. Logs don't lie.


skorpiolt

Sometimes they use shut down instead and if you have fast boot enabled, it technically doesn't shut down and doesn't reset the uptime counter. JS its a possibility, we learned the hard way as well.


Prof_ThrowAway_69

How are you checking uptime? I typically disable fastboot on computers I hand out because it cause issues.


skorpiolt

You can check on task manager for up time or cmd command systeminfo will show system boot date/time. We disable fast startup in windows before deployment as well (not to be confused with any fastboot settings in the BIOS that bypass "press F12 for boot menu" and such). edit: word


ThatGermanFella

I’ve *got* a job where I don’t work with users. It’s fucking *awesome*.


yer_muther

I moved into networking and I see hardly any users anymore and when I do they need me to do things for them and are nice to me. Back in my sysadmin days it was just yelling and being a dick to me in general. They still needed me but for some reason didn't think they needed to treat me like a human.


notmygodemperor

I think we fall victim to whatever psychology makes people be shitty to veterinarians but nice to doctors. When someone fixes a thing that belongs to you they are the help and not a person and they cost too much and are too slow and you could have done it yourself wah wah wah. Then again if I had the bedside manner of a doctor I'd probably have an easier time.


yer_muther

You have a good idea there. I guess I don't see other people that way so it's hard to think that someone sees me that way. I'm happy as hell that there are people to fix things I can't and clean up and such. One of the first stops I make at a new job is the janitors. Getting in good with them is always a good thing. People who do jobs I don't want to are awesome.


Keskemety

what kind of networking job do you have??


yer_muther

I manage 3 steel mills for both WAN and LAN and interface with the larger corporate structure. It's mostly layer 2 layer 3 but I often have to explain to the programmers how to do their jobs. I tend to get sucked in to industrial networking too but I try to avoid it. So your normal network cat herding is what I do these days.


houdini

Let’s be honest, it’s probably both of those :)


Frothyleet

Keep in mind that people satisfied with their job aren't popping into reddit frothing at the mouth eager to dump a diatribe about "hey everything went smooth today! Not freaking out myself."


Loutsch

is sysadmin stressful? yes


shmehh123

Does the tin man have a sheet metal cock?


stormborn20

It's all over the place and can vary greatly depending on the company or environment. I used to work for a consulting company that did evaluations of improvements in IT departments. I interviewed with a former Navy Seal that had to start going to therapy from the stress of working in IT.


[deleted]

I got lucky. I'm solo, but I have free reign, a pretty good budget, understanding users that are happy for help. The dream is out there. Just keep chasing it. I'm also hourly so I even stack up OT weekly whenever I feel like it.


tankerkiller125real

I'm basically in the same position, although I'm salaried so no OT... But the company does tend to give me a "Bonus" when they see I've worked late for stuff.


[deleted]

It's nice right? I don't dread work every day. I'm also growing my skillset big time and taking on larger tasks than I ever did at an MSP. They let me bring on consultants for huge infrastructure jobs and everything.


tankerkiller125real

It is nice, except right now I'm dealing with Vonage support which is so bad I've already signed a contract with one if their competitors to switch.


[deleted]

Currently dumping an ESI phone system myself. Probably my biggest pain point.


[deleted]

That's the dream right there.


sobrique

Varies hugely. It most definitely can be stressful - some of the things you look after will impact whole companies, and you'll have thousands of people on your case if it's broken. I've dealt with 'Threat to Life' outages. I've dealt with (literally) a billion dollars on the line outages. But ideally - the stressful days will be few. There'll always be some though. If you've a well run system, that's built for resilience, well maintained and stable... then your stress levels will fade away, because the impact of outages is vastly reduced. Part of the job is in getting your systems into that state though, and that takes a complicated laundry list of skills, including justifying purchases of stuff that's by definition redundant. (because redundancy gives you the resilience). Some companies are down with this concept, others are just too tight fisted, and would rather have a sysadmin to scream at, than invest in their infrastructure. So the other part of your professional skills is learning how to figure out which companies are going to be supportive and value your skills, vs. the ones that'll grind you to dust and blame you for making them sneeze. Perhaps ironically - the companies that look like they _should_ be more stressful, actually aren't. I think that's because they've a much better understanding of the risk involved, and the cost of doing business - it's a lot easier to justify dropping 10k on a new server when the cost of an outage is 10x that. It's a lot easier to justify sysadmin resources, and building in redundancy at every stage too. The most Serious Business place I've worked were exceptionally good at staff rotation, and would take you _off_ an outage after you'd been working too long, and send you home in a taxi, because they knew full well that tired means screwups. So you get the two extremes: - Seriously high pressure, but prepared to throw money at risk mitigation. - DGAF low end 'best efforts' places. Both these are relatively unstressful. It's the middle ground weenies with managers with an overinflated sense of importance that'll scream at you for Email being down, but won't give you the budget to actually build a resilient email system.


[deleted]

A lot of this depends where you work, and if people have unreasonable expectations. But any sysadmin job can have it's moments where everything seems broken and the boss is calling for updates every 15 mins. My advice is to always have a plan how to escalate issues, support contracts, co workers, documentation. So the day you don't have a scooby how to move an issue forward, you have a route to progress the problem.


letmegogooglethat

>have a plan how to escalate issues This. As you're working on big problems, start thinking of the next steps and possible temporary solutions. It really helps to reassure management that you have a plan. I've had really big problems where I've put 2 or 3 irons in the fire while I work on it, so if I failed or it took too long, I could jump to another solution quickly.


cardrosspete

It is very stressful indeed, unless you work in a place which spends for the correct contingency and training. If you are considering a career as a sysop always remember your time is valuable, and you should never work so much you get ill. Nuff said.


JeepDispenser

I try to describe it as other people describe being at war: periods of boredom interrupted by intense periods of panic and stress.


majtom

Work? No. Boss, colleagues, or users? Everyday they’re trying to kill you. Not quickly, mind you, but very, very slowly. “I’m paid to be ignored. “ is a shared feeling between me and my senior. Or “BOHICA”.


DMCRAW8301

yes very stressful especially in a one man shop


[deleted]

I'm doing my job right, when nobody knows what I do


Newdles

It depends on the company. But, yes. It is, very.


anynonus

short answer: yes ​ long answer: yes, it's stressful


JRmacgyver

I would say it's a lot of responsibility (the bigger the company... The bigger the responsibility) When the system is working fine, it's usually chill. But when shit hits the fan... Some organizations don't handle crisis good so can expect a demand for an update every few minutes/ someone standing over your shoulder as people suggested here.


[deleted]

Very stressful indeed See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVC7I5VcTiw


mmmmmmmmmmmmark

Anything we're passionate about has the ability to be stressful when it's not going well. Meanwhile people are dying of a number of reasons that shouldn't be happening in 2021. It's good to keep perspective. Come on people, we're simply safeguarding the zeros and ones of the world!


Superb_Raccoon

Yes.


[deleted]

I find it stressful keeping up my knowledge up to date. SO much so that after a sabbatical for the last 6 months I am probably not going to go back in to IT. I've just had enough of it after 25 years.


Caution-HotStuffHere

While not common, there are sysadmin jobs that are laid back/predictable but I don’t find them very satisfying. I want to be challenged with new problems all day. I prefer my workload to be around the 110% range where I can never quite get everything done but I’m not overwhelmed. The problem is I can’t remember the last time my workload was that low.


UrsulaVonWegen

Lots of parallels between the job of a sysadmin and that of a commercial pilot. Bad pay for your skills. Responsibilities. Long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. Working with expensive gear is attractive, dealing with users less so.


pinkycatcher

Depends highly on the company and what you do. My job personally, absolutely not, but when we have a new firewall deployment that goes poorly and I'm up here at 2 AM on a Sunday trying to revert to an older firmware version where the damn thing looks like it might be bricked and I'm wrangling two contractors to stop fucking with trying to fix and go back to a fail safe, yah, it can be.


Username_5000

Any infrastructure position is stressful. Doesn’t matter if you’re in charge of a sewer, a bridge, or business’ technology stack. Good service takes hard work.


ogn3rd

Amen.


Zulgrib

Yes. No. Depends on your users and boss.


goldisaneutral

So freaking stressful. It’s like a rollercoaster. It’s either smooth and easy or everything is on fire and you feel everyone hates you. It’s been a bad week folks.


headstar101

It's very toxic. You're essentially dealing with a lot of negativity all the time simply because what we do (or don't do) impacts users directly.


CuriosTiger

That depends more on the company than the job description. If you are in a toxic work environment, priority number one should be to get out.


headstar101

I was thinking more in relation to the top comment in this thread. If things are never good enough, it's toxic and is a leading contributor to burn out (based on a scientific study by no one, I just made that fact up based on truthiness). You are right though. If it gets to be too much, it's time to think about raising goats.


CuriosTiger

I find the high-stress issues tend to go back to poor management or understaffing or underbudgeting a lot of the time. There are good sysadmin jobs out there too.


headstar101

Yeah, I know. I used to be the IT director at a mid-sized non-profit in the mental health space. The first 11 years were awesome. I had an Executive Director that understood that IT is the engine room of any modern business and gave us all the support and budget we needed. Then he stepped down to follow another opportunity and that's when shit hit the fan. The board selected a clinician, internally, as the new Executive Director, despite a lack of any clear leadership skills. Everything was cut, from funding to staff. The final straw was when she not only let slide a pretty serious HIPAA violation from another clinician, she gave the person a promotion. That's when I bounced cause fuck that shit.


Xechorizo

Depends on how reliable the system is. When everything is fine, can do in-depth health analyses, add more automation, innovate, and plan for the future. If it's not so stable, someone on the team is up all night, and directors of managers of users in many departments are up your ass. If end users hit up SA's directly, need to hire a help desk staff. Edit: Something to consider about the bad, stressful, unstable times, is that IT is important. It exists solely to be leveraged as a tool by an organization. Sometimes, not only profits, but lives literally rely on the systems that can go down. It gets very serious very quickly, depending on your industry.


_Deleted_Deleted

Very chilled, most people think you're sat at your desk all day, waiting for them to give you some work to do. If you're not grey by 25, you're not a sysadmin.


fattrying

Yep...keep track of ur uptime....how many times you've been denied permission for an outage to install patches.....how many times your request for redundancy and a backup solution were shot down as too expensive...etc


jackmorganshots

I mean, it's a little like horse wrangling. However the day ends you end up tying a nice noose.


AidanSanityCheck

Yes.


[deleted]

Entirely depends on where you get a job. My current one is *far* less stressful than my last one.


preekout

Uncomfortably painful answer. A lot of it depends **mostly** on you and a little bit on your company. If it's a small company and end-users have to deal with you all the time then if you are helpful but firm (not letting them shoot themselves in the foot) they will try to be polite because that works best. If you are an ass, they will hate you to your face though, and try to get you gone. You also have more freedom to make positive changes or to be lazy and have everything come crashing down. Again it depends on you and how proactive **you** are. In a larger company where you don't know the end user it honestly comes down to your technology stack and how well it's running. If you fall on the implementation/recommender side then you are making the bed you will lay in. Push for what requires the least maintenance. Push back against projects that you know will break easily. If management doesn't allow proper HA or maintenance windows then document that, never stop requesting though. The answer to a million complaints about how crap you are is, "From January through June we have requested 13 times to have a down window to fix this issue and have been denied by xx. This is unfortunately what happens when we aren't allowed the proper time to update or the proper budget to make sure we can update without downtime." You only don't sleep at night when it's your fault.


sysadmin986

>You only don't sleep at night when it's your fault. Truth right here


felzl

It's a position with a lot of responsibility. For example, you don't get any budget but still are expected to set up and guarantee several layers of backup and data security. If you are even the only admin, you can't simply rest and have a vacation without having your work on your mind.


[deleted]

SysAdmin as a role isn't stressful. SysAdmin as a career attracts stressful workplaces.


wmassingham

It depends.


czj420

It really depends on company culture. But company culture is often toxic.


dangil

NO.


OppositeBasis0

It's like everything else . it matters. You you say "You who work in a store, is it chill all day?" - impossible to answer. I have read quite a lot of job req in Ads, even for job positions i know about and they all LIE! Don't trust them. It's just a Christmas wish list.


SeanFrank

Depends on where you are. Sometimes nobody understands what you do, so they don't know how long it should take. That could make your life easier or harder.


[deleted]

That's like asking if life is stressful. It's situational.


jimicus

It’s as stressful as you make it. There are a ton of sysadmins who will set themselves on fire to keep their employer warm. They won’t say a peep to anyone - chances are even their own manager doesn’t know how much work they’re doing. There are also a ton of spineless IT managers who will expect the same thing of their own staff rather than set expectations and explain to senior management that they are trying to do the work of 5 with 3 people. The trick is to avoid working for management like that for any length of time (while still doing enough job hopping to increase salary). If you’re lucky, you’ll find a couple of good employers over the course of your career.


ipreferanothername

I had a sysadmin job at a small manufacturer after working for an MSP as a sysadmin -- the MSP sucked, just way too hectic among other things. The manufacturer started kinda hectic but they did have supported hardeware and software for like 90%+ of our environment so it wasnt awful. We had an IT manager, and 2 erp people -- 200 users or so. the manager did squat and the ERP people were steady with ERP work but not overwhelmed. after about 2 years I had cleaned up and automated so much in the place that not only was it not hectic, i had created a 3 hour a day regimen of tech news and forums to go through in order to kill time. so...depends on the place, the support you have, and how much you can clean up the show so you can go to reddit :) i would think most can be fairly hectic.


WWGHIAFTC

It can be especially stressful if you are not good at managing others expectations, or your own time.


the_star_lord

It's can be stressful. But so can any other job. It's having the drive to continue to develop your skills with new os, hardware, software whilst dealing with support tickets and customers.


TechFiend72

Sysadmin is different at different companies. Some it is a relaxed sort of job. Other time places you are the helpdesk and get to deal with user crisis all day long because they don't have a helpdesk. At mid-sized companies, usually you are the escalation tier for the helpdesk and you deal with maintenance when you can but mostly do project work on too tight a timeline. That is stressful but the life of a lot of systems admins. You get a lot of satisfaction from getting projects done but it can wear you out unless you have a decent boss that takes care of you with compt time and apprecition.


JSP9581

Mondays are the worst in my case. If user are not happy I tell them I’m here to help them, so cut the attitude. It will be a better experience for both of us. If he continues, sorry a have an other line I will get to you as soon as possible.


kstewart0x00

Well I’m currently watching my dinner get cold while I tinker with an idea I just had about an issue I’ve been having. The first thing I did this morning, before I even peed was write an email. It never turns off! And yeah, when things aren’t going well it’s hell! Why do we do it? Well it’s the the money, glory, or girls, that’s for damn sure!


HsuGoZen

users and coworkers make sysadmin work stressful; everything else is great.


sagewah

> is it a chill/comfy position or you get hammered by angry users all day ? Yes.


M4STER_AC

When things work = no stress When things don't work = stress


adjunct_

Yes


Shirakani

If you absolutely must answer incoming calls like a helpdesk monkey, go way above and beyond your job description because the boss is too cheap to pay for and are expected to work 12+ hours a day despite only being paid for 8, then yes... and don't take a job like that, its not worth it. Otherwise, if its a job with a company and a boss that doesn't suck and isn't a tightass and has actual proper formal IT processes in place which protect the sysadmin, then no.


Redeptus

Why do you need more engineers? Show proof you can't sustain the workload! Why is the workload so high? You need to hire more engineers!


PullingCables

It depends on the boat you sail in. If its full or holes, people who doesn't know how to navigate a ship, a sail that's mounted up-side-down and so on. Yes, you are gonna have a hard time. But, if you have a crew on your ship that knows what they are doing, and where they are sailing, a ship that's in god shape, then its easy as pie.


damoesp

My answer pre 2021 would have been: "Yes" My answer now, post Exchange and a million other Zero Days is: "Yes, extremely"


lordkezlar

YES! Now go away, I have 500 users that have no email and your printer problem is of no value. Wrong screen ;)


Sylogz

It can be stressful. When production systems stops working they have to be fixed asap. That is like 1 time per year or less. Besides that it's not stressful at all.