Episode 14, Jobs

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System Administrator's code of Ethics

Jobs

Thud: Seg, what do you like about being a systems administrator?

Seg: I've been working on computers for more years than I can count now. When I discovered Linux and Unix, I realized that Cisco switches were not for me. It's a long story, but when I understood the joy that could be had from solving all the problems that exist in the career of a systems administrator and making things right, making things work, serving information and really being the hub of a lot of critical systems it was really exciting for me. I have no doubt that this kind of job is not for everybody. In fact, judging by the market I know for sure it's not for everybody. But it is for me. I'm one of the few people on the earth who is crazy enough to want to be a systems administrator. I like the thrill of the job. I like when fires are started and there's a critical situation that needs to get fixed right away and there's very important data that needs to get recovered and it's a very serious live situation; there's a really clear and present danger and I can get on top of the situation. I really like that thrill of solving the problem and putting out the fire. Maybe I was a firefighter in another life, I don't know, but it is that thrill that I enjoy the most. I also find it fun writing code. I like writing programs and things like that. That is a big part of being a systems administrator. Part of it is being a developer.


When I'm looking for a job as a systems administrator there are a lot of things that I take into account. These are very important for most people, if not all people, that want to be systems administrators. One of the things I look for is distance from the place where I can live. That's very important. Although not, obviously, a technical qualification it is very important for peace of mind and sanity. Another thing I look for is the stability of the company that I'm going to interview with. I try to do some research, find out how long they've been around. I try to get some sense of how big they are, how many customers do they host and what kind of services do they provide. These are questions you can get during the interview. It is also a good idea to try to find out as much as you can prior to the interview.

Thud: Gek, what do you like about being a systems administrator?

Gek: What I like about being a systems administrator is the control that you have over the systems that you are working on. Part of being a good systems administrator is
knowing the pieces that you need to watch, how to track problems, how to anticipate problems, and just having your hands in things and knowing what's going on. I've always enjoyed that part of any job that I do. For me that was the real attraction; with a systems administrator that's basically the core of what you do. You're job is to monitor the boxes that you're on, develop policies and procedures that keep things running. It's just a level of control that I enjoy having over those systems.

Thud: So I guess we're all in agreement: be an Internet firefighter become a sys admin?

Seg: Oh yes, absolutely.

Gek: Yes.

Thud: The next thing that usually comes up when we're talking about jobs, especially in the IT industry, is certifications. There are tons of them out there, do they really matter?

Seg: Yes, I think that certifications do matter in the general sense certifications do absolutely matter. I've talked to a lot of companies and again, I'm speaking in general they didn't really care what kind of certs you had, just that you had a cert. That you were proficient enough to go out and get a certification that you're not a complete dunce. This isn't for everybody of course, it's a very broad and general statement, but it's not going to fit for every specific circumstance. You need to have certifications that are relevant for the type of work that you want to do within the umbrella of systems administrator. Of the type of systems I work on, most are Free BSD and Solaris and I have a Solaris certification. When I'm interviewing for a job, I'm usually going to be going for a Solaris position and I can say, "Yes, I know Solaris. Here's proof of my certification." That's fantastic. It's never going to hurt you to have a certification. That's very important. If you're going for a Solaris job and you have a cert in OS2, as impossible as that probably is, it doesn't matter. That isn't going to hurt you. They're not going to say, "Well we would hire him, but he's got a cert in OS2. We really can't do that." It's never going to hurt you at all. When you're interviewing for a position or you're making up your resume always include your certifications. Even if they aren't completely related put them on there - they are an important fact. It's still possible to get a job as a systems administrator without any certifications and I am living proof of that. Again, if you've got them they're going to do nothing but help you.

Thud: That's been my experience. It's best to get certifications that are as close to what you're actually doing as you can possibly manage. In the end, when it comes to getting a job they're basically extra points. If you have an MCSE, for example, it shows you can study and you know how Windows works to some extent. More importantly it show that you are willing to sit down and learn to do something to accomplish your task, which in that case would be getting a certification. I have a Red Hat certification. It doesn't mean I'm an expert in all things Red Hat; it just means I have a certain level of knowledge and understanding in it. If I have that on a resume the people that are interviewing me are going to see that and obviously going to hit me with a lot of Red Hat questions just to verify it. Is it going to get me more money? Probably not. What do you think Gek?

Gek: I have to agree with what both of you said. For me the idea of getting a certification isn't so much for potential employers as it is to know that I've gotten to a certain point and I can prove that I know this level. I also have a Red Hat certification and a Windows certification and it's more just to say, "I've done this much, I can prove that I know this much." The employers are going to look at it a little differently. For a lot of them it is going to be just an extra points kind of thing. For some company programs you are required to have a certain number of people with certain certifications, so it is likely or possible that somebody would hire you because of the certifications. That allows them to fill their quota for, say, a Microsoft program that requires a certain number of MCSEs.

Seg: I'd like to make a small side note related to what you just said, Gek. This doesn't apply to a lot of companies but it does to some specific ones I know of: having technicians with certain certifications is a good selling point for customers. A company can say, "You should host with us because we have x, y and z and they have certs a, b and c so we have technical staff that knows exactly what they're doing." It is a good selling point for some companies.

Thud: I've seen that before. "Our technicians are certified so they're really good at studying, but who knows about running servers?"


[laughter]

Thud: Some of the emails we've gotten have asked us specifically about finding system administrator jobs. In general and actually one in particular was about finding remote system administrator jobs. One email we got was from August 4th and he asked us specifically about things he can do to develop his skills, obviously with the idea of having a better resume`, and places to find jobs as a sys admin. So let's talk a little about things you can do to develop your skills to have a little fuller resume. Gek, what do you suggest?

Gek: I love reading books. I'm a big fan of the O'Reilly books and one of the things I did to help build my skills was to subscribe to the O'Reilly online safari bookshelf. That way I can check things out, I can pick a topic and check a few books out and start reading until I really understand it and I'm not stuck with books that I might not read again, I can just return the books to them and check new books out. It's not something I can show on a resume but if someone asks me questions, I can answer the questions intelligently because I've read the material.

Thud: Another side note, from my personal experience, what you can say during an interview is a lot more important than what your resume shows. I've looked at resumes. I've been part of the interviewer process, and of course I've been part of the interviewee process plenty of times. And I've found that it's more important to be able to answer the questions they're going to have than to put those answers on your resume. If you know a lot about, let's say Solaris Volume Manager, then you can put Solaris Volume Manager on your resume and if they see that and they think enough to ask you a question on it, then it's very important that you are able to answer those questions. So although you might not be able to put a lot of stuff on your resume about Solaris Volume Manager, like I rebuilt this many of raids, and I've done this kind of raid, and I've invented a whole new type of raid, if you're up on SVM and people ask you about it then that's fantastic. That's what the interviewers want to hear. They want to hear the right answers to their questions.


As somebody who's responsible for doing interviews at my job, if you put something on your resume, you better know it. It's one thing to have a resume for all the resume websites that have all the acronyms that are very attractive and that people often search for but the resume that you actually send in when you're setting up an interview, you have to know all that stuff really well because there's been lots of people I interview that know TCP and UDP and TCPIP on their resume as well and you start hitting them with stuff and they don't really know it. So it's important to put things on your resume that you really know and understand. As far as developing more skills to put on there, it really depends on how well you learn. For me, I can sit down and read a book and I pick up some general knowledge but not any real experience. I find I'm a lot better at just going out and doing something. So the first time I set up a DNS server, I read and understood how DNS worked and started playing around with setting it up and actually proving to myself that I know how it worked. So a lot of times, if you have some free time, just take a project and go set up a DNS server or set up a web server or a my sequel server, something new, something to keep you busy something to keep you learning. You can put it on your resume if you understand it. You don't necessarily have had to get paid to do it in a past job.


That's pretty much what I was going to chime in with. One of the early sys admin jobs I got, I was coming from no sys admin experience, professionally at least. But I find, as far as building my skill set up goes, I like to set up test systems and I say well I don't know how to run a mail server. Never done it before but I want to know how to do it. So I'll build a box, I'll rent a server, I'll do whatever I have to do to just get some kind of system up and then just start messing with it. When it comes resume time, I'll put in my resume I've built, configured and used a mail server just in my spare time. Most people, I'm guessing when I say most, most people are not going to get down on you for not doing it professionally but they're going to end up asking you questions about it. They're going to say OK well what sort of mail program server did you use, what kind of problems did you run in to, how did you fix them, what did you break. Because I was able to stand up a sandbox system, build a mail server, and kind of figure out how to get it off the ground, I was able to say this is what I did, this is what I did, this is what I did. I didn't get paid for any of it, it wasn't critical information, but I know the basics of doing that and that's proof of the ability. That's proof of your knowledge of it, your proficiency with it, to whatever level it may be. I'm not against reading. Heck, I do tons of reading everyday just as part of my job; like reading tickets and reading code and just reading all the time. But as far as reading manuals goes, not really my forte. I like to get in there, I like to break it, I like to figure out how it works and then when I have a question that I can't figure out, then I go reference the manuals. A lot of people I know are like that, but not everybody of course. That's what I recommend for building your skill set. Just get out there, go to NewEgg and buy just a crappy little E3 if you can. Just get a small little system and start throwing different OSes on it. Just start figuring out how stuff works. You don't have to be a systems administrator to become a systems administrator. Just get out there and get your feet wet.


Gek brings up a good point. If you're having a hard time because you don't have a computer that you can play around on, go find one. Find someone who's trying to throw away a machine, or look up on sites like FreeCycle or Craigslist and see if you can find someone who's just giving one away or selling something that's within your price range. If that's not an option, if you live somewhere that you are just not going to find something like that, download QEMU or get a copy of VMware or something else where you can play with a virtual machine and start learning on that. I've heard a lot of people in interviews say, well I just don't have the time to play with that, or I don't have the hardware, and a good sys admin is somebody who's going to find a way past that problem. You've got to start there. You've got to have the mindset, well if I can't buy a machine then I'll use an emulator. If I can't use an emulator because I don't own a computer then I'll go find a computer at the library and I'll use a bootable live CD. You have to find someway to get your hands on it and that really is the way that most people start learning.


Let's cover Augmented Force, the second part of his question: Which was just generally how do you find a job as a sys admin.


When I was looking recently. Basically what I did was I went to Dice, HotJob, Monster, every site that I could think of and put my resume out there. Then I went to Craigslist and started looking for the online job listings. You've just got to be really proactive. The market is saturated with candidates and if you are a good candidate, even getting an interview can be difficult because of the volume of people out there. It really depends on the type of work that you're looking for. If you want to be a contractor then you're going to look in a different place than if you want to work full time. If you want to start up your own business then that's a completely different way of handling it. It really depends on what you are looking for in a position. For me personally, I've always looked for full time, non contract positions and so I go to the main menus. I look at the local employment ads.


And the websites that everybody else goes to and then I just keep looking until I find somewhere I like and get a interview.


And another good place is local computer user groups, like a OneX user group or a BSD user group. Some of them even have separate mailing lists specifically for jobs. I know one in, basically every major city, has a tech job mailing list somewhere. It may even be a news group. Those are always good places to go and see what's being posted. And also ask if there are any openings anywhere.

Seg: I can't throw a lot into this topic. Every job I've ever had as far as systems administration goes, I've had from Monster. I've had my resume on Monster for years. I know that there are a lot of job sites out there. I know that you said dice.com and hotjobs. There are a lot of job sites for local areas. But I've always gone to Monster. Monster is not the end all be all of job sites, but I've made it work for me. I could have gotten better jobs, I could have gotten better salaries if I was more proactive in it, if I was out there doing a lot more footwork. If I was out there doing a lot more leg work and posting a lot of different places. I would have had a lot more opportunities. Just for my own, and I'm not saying this would work for anyone else. My own personal experience, Monster has been just fine enough for me.

Thud: Yeah, actually all of my recent jobs I've gotten through Monster. This actually brings up a good point. One of the things that I do is that I have a Monster resume, again that has all of the acronyms and all of the search terms that people look for. But then I also have a technical resume. So once I get the possibility of an interview from a Monster resume, I'll just shoot them a copy of my technical resume, which really is more detailed of the things that I do. And if another geek picked it up and looked at it, they would be able to figure out exactly what kind of knowledge I have. That's a good trick that's worked really well for me because it gives an opportunity to have the headhunters find you. Then once you're doing an interview with technical people, it shows that you really do have the technical detail that they're looking for. And it also shows that you're another geek because you have one things that lists all those specific things that you've done in the past and the knowledge that you have, which is just a subset of your regular resume. And it comes in really handy. For someone that does interviews, I much prefer to see a technical resume as opposed to a just a general "hey come find me" type resume.

Gek: We got an email from Tim Veer asking about remote jobs. And the best that I could come up with for this is if you're looking for doing something remote, try and find venues that are local for wherever it is that you want to work. If I wanted to do remote work in California, then I'd probably use Craigslist to try and find people who are looking for a Sys Admin position. Then I would just send them an email saying, "Hey have you ever thought about this. It could be done..." You could even offer it cheaper because you wouldn't even have to go out there. They wouldn't have to provide you with space. Additionally, you could line up like two or three of these gigs and work them on the same days. So it just depends on how you're trying to market yourself. But I would say you want to look for the local venues, the local papers, that kind of thing.

Seg: I want to throw a quick warning out to Junior Sys Admins out in the area who might be listening to this. If you're not a Systems Administrator and you don't have any experience in it, don't come into the field with the idea or assumption that you're going to get trained. Everything that I've seen, there is absolutely no training with a Systems administrator within the job. It's not like you're going to go work for a burger joint where they're going to say, "this is how you work the fryer, this is how you wrap the sandwiches." It doesn't work like that with Systems Administrators. Now there's a lot of on the job training, once you get in. There's usually a lot of opportunity to go and get your fingers into stuff and to teach yourself about things. And of course you can ask a lot of questions. But don't expect any formal training. If you're coming into Systems Administrator or you think you want to be a Sys Admin, as we said previously, work on your own systems, try to break them, try to fix them. Get some experience with that. Once you're got an understanding of a lot of different types of systems that are under the Sys Admin umbrella, then try to get a job with that kind of experience as a Junior Sys Admin. A lot of places I know of, they do have Junior Sys Admin positions. They're made just for that kind of experience level. But again, if you get that kind of experience and you get a job as a Sys Admin, don't expect to get formally trained at all because from what I've seen, that just doesn't exist. The training that brought me from a Junior to a regular Sys Admin was all about doing it myself. I was like, "OK, I need to learn about this," so I went and I taught myself about that. And certain problems came up and I asked people about them. There wasn't any proactive training. People didn't come to me and sit me down with a big book and say, "OK, if this happens, do this, if this happens, do this, here's everything you need to know about Sys Admins." Because honestly, if you take any Sys Admin out in the world, they don't know everything. They don't know anywhere near close to everything. Sys Admins just like everybody else, they've got the things they're really good at, they've got the things that they're learning, but there's always the majority, which is they just don't know.

Thud: That brings up a good point. As somebody, again, who is responsible for doing interviews for the company where I work. If you can show from your experience or on your resume or just during general discussion during the interview that you are somebody who is willing to go out and train themselves and really enjoys that, you're going to get so many points, especially in a tech company. Because most of the companies where you're going to be a System Administrator are not going to have time to show you how to be a System Administrator. They're going to show you how email works, they're going to show you whatever they're knowledge based app is and whatever their ticket system is and then they're going to set you free. And you're going to run into things you don't know and from somebody who does interviews, it is very very important that they people we end up hiring can figure stuff out on their own and can train themselves. It would be nice if we had a budget and time to go out and train people. But it's very important that you do it yourself. And that gives you so many more points when you're doing an interview. It shows that you're a worthy investment for the owner of that company to make in hiring you. That you're going to fix the problems even if you don't know how to do it, you're going to figure it out.

Gek: You should also be aware that you're not an expert on what the person that you're interviewing with knows. So if you try and BS an answer or say something that you're not sure about, you might be running into somebody who knows that technology extremely well and who will know that you're incorrect. I actually interviewed somebody over the phone sometime who kept asking me if I was following what they were saying. The truth is that I was following what they were saying and they were completely wrong about the technology that they were talking about.

Thud: Yeah, that kind of brings us to the next section on tips for being an interviewee. Seg, what are some tips that you have for being an interviewee during an interview?

Seg: When doing an interview and you're getting technical questions asked of you, if you don't know just say you don't know. Honesty goes a long way with most people. I've never run into a situation where that kind of honesty hurt me. Maybe, I'm sure with six billion people on the planet, honesty is going to be bad for some of them. But I've never run into a situation where me saying, "I just don't know," has ever hurt me. The core idea is you don't know, they want you to be honest about it. They also want you to be able to learn. If something breaks, you should be able to be free to say, "I don't know how to fix that, but give me some time and I'll be able to figure it out." That's really what the hiring people are looking for as far as the core of a Systems Administrator. Because people who are reasonable know that the person who is coming in to interview, they're not going to know everything. They're probably going to keep asking you questions until they hit that limit because that's their job. They want to find out where your boundaries are. And if you're going to BS, if you're going to try to sidestep your way into it, you might get lucky with a couple of answers. But all in all, it's a bad thing to do on so many levels. You could know a lot about one system, but then BS one answer and they know you BSed it, then that's it. They won't hire you because you BSed through it. And that's not to say that that's exactly the way it is in every situation, but it's a really good idea to have when you're interviewing.


Another tip is, and again, maybe it's just me. Before I interview I ask the supervisor/manager, whoever it is I'm talking with on the phone or emails, I say, "What is the expected dress code? Is it going to be casual, business casual, business? And whatever they tell you, do it. I've gone to interviews where they said, "Don't wear a suit. Whatever you do, don't wear a suit." I'm fine with that. Other interviews, they want business casual, and some places they just don't care. It's like, as long as it's not offensive, just show up and you'll be fine. It's an important question to ask. You don't want to show up... if you don't ask it, you could show up wearing the exact wrong thing. They expect you to be casual and you're wearing a suit, or vice versa and that could put you in a very bad situation. Gek, what are your thoughts on this?

Gek: I would have to say that you're right. You need to make sure you ask them questions. I think interviewers like it when they feel like they're being engaged. And you're not just kind of sitting there being attacked with questions. And don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to answer a question, like Seg said, saying, "I don't know." But also, don't be afraid to give your opinion on a different package. Like we interviewed one person and he told us, "Oh, I hate that piece of software," and everyone in the office did also. That won him some points. Because it lets people know that you have an opinion, and if you have an opinion like that and say so, you should make sure you can back it up. But you have to engage the person that you're interviewing and leave a memory that makes you different from all the other people that they're interviewing. And you don't want that memory to be "Well, this person told me a whole bunch of stuff, none of it was true, I'm not sure they're the right person to bring in.

Seg: I want to throw in another tip. Try to work on how you answer questions, especially the ones that you don't know. I was talking with a tech, this wasn't an interview situation but it's a good example for this. I was talking with a tech last week about setting up VAX/Windows, KDE and VNC server. And with my level of experience one might honestly assume that this will be child's play for me. It's like, "Obviously, Seg has done this, this and this, he's been doing this for that long, obviously he knows exactly how to do it." But the fact of the matter is I'd never done it. I thought about doing it but I just never had the need, and I still don't actually have a need to do the project that I was working on. I was doing it that time last week because I had the ability to do it. And talking with him about it, it was something he had done already plenty of times, and he started... I could sense that he started to get a little surprised that I hadn't done it yet.


Well, I answered his question by saying basically I'm sure I can do it, I haven't done it yet, and so I'm doing it now. And that's sort of a middle ground way to answer the question. If somebody asked me, "What do you know about OS Tab?" Well, I can answer it in a lot of different ways. The fact is, I don't know anything about OS Tab. Never used OS Tab. But I don't want to answer it in a way that says, "I don't know anything about it, I don't want to deal with it. I have no hopes for learning anything about it." I want to answer that question away with, "I haven't had the chance to work with it yet. But I'm hopeful that I'll learn more about it when I get a chance to work with it." You want to answer it in sort of a middle ground or positive way. We're dealing with human beings here during these interviews. We're not dealing with machines. So if you can take what is essentially a down answer and create a positive lift to it, then it's going to go a long way.

Gek: And remember the only impression that you're going to give them is this one impression with the interview. If they don't like you, you're never coming back.

Thud: Exactly. One of the things I want to point out is, from personal experience, there have been times in the past when I was looking for a sys admin job. The advertisement that I was answering was for a sys admin job. When I got into the interview, I realized it was not even a technical job. What they really wanted was a data entry or secretarial type position. Once you get into an interview and you realize that it's not a position that you're going to be happy with, don't be afraid of telling the interviewer, "Look, I'm just not interested. This is not what I thought it was going to be. There's no point in both of us wasting our time. So let's just cut this short." Because I've been in interviews where I was trying to be nice and trying to at least leave an impression on them, hoping that later on if they really did need a system administrator they would remember me. And it just never worked out. It's much better if you just go ahead and tell them five or six minutes into the interview when you realize it's not going to work out that you don't think you're a good fit for the job.

Seg: Yeah, I want to go back to asking questions. During the interview, try to ask as many questions about how the company works, and get a feel for it. That way you can find out right away whether it's actually going to be right for you. And the questions that you can ask are going to be varied. There are a lot of those kinds of questions that you can ask. What you want to first ask yourself, "What am I actually looking for?" If you already have sys admin experience, you've already worked for data centers or hosting companies, whatever. You've already been in that kind of environment, then you're going to be better equipped to ask these questions. And it is very important. You can save an interview by asking questions. Honestly, if you go in and say, "We can get the technical stuff in a minute. If you wouldn't mind I'd like to learn more about your company, more than what I've already learned. Can I find out what you're about?" Ask them whatever you need to ask them.

Ask them: "How big is it? What kind of customer base do you have in terms of size? What kind of ticket systems do you have? What kind of response times are expected, who do I support, who supports me? What tier, what level is above me that I need to get support from? And what's the tier below me, be it the customers or just a lower technical tier? Who do I support? What kind of... how many managers will I have? How many different departments will I have to work with? Are there other locations? Do I need to have a lot of contact with those other locations?"


Of course, each question in itself isn't critical usually, but by asking these very important questions you're doing some very wonderful things.


You're figuring out if this place is right for you and you're giving the interviewer a very, very good image of yourself. You're showing that you're interested, you're showing, as we had said earlier, you're engaging them and people who are doing the interview in my experience and I think, Thud and Gek, you both agree with me on this. We don't want to feel like we're some untouchable council. We don't want to feel like we're up high and the interviewee's down low and we have this sheet of unanswerable questions and they have to get them right. We don't want it to be a power struggle. We want to just sit at the same level and just find out more about the person we're interviewing and give them a fair chance to tell us about themselves.

Gek: The other good thing about getting the interviewer talking is that they may reveal facts about the job that you wouldn't necessarily ask for but are extremely important to you. And it'll give you a sense of the culture and the place that you're looking at also. There are a lot of different kinds of cultures in the IT industry and can certainly find yourself at a place where you're much busier than you thought you would be, you're not happy with the workload and the rules are more stringent than you thought. And that's not necessarily for everybody. If you're somebody who has a particular idea of the kind of place you want to work, then you want to make sure you ask questions that will give you a good idea whether that's the right fit.

Seg: And getting back to the point about leaving a good impression on them. Another thing you can do is do a little bit of research on the company that you're interviewing with. Bring up their website. If they have PR posts that they do on their website, read through those. If, for example, you find that they've just signed a big contract with another company, Company XYZ, in the interview, ask them about that. It shows that you have enough initiative to do a little bit of research on them. And it shows that you're actually paying attention to what they're doing. It can make the interviewee kind of feel like they're in part of the company to the interviewer. They're not even working there yet but they're already kind of part of it. It's a really good way to leave a very good impression.

Gek: That is a fantastic suggestion. It is absolutely awesome. And that kind of information you can get from a number of places. If you're talking about a big merger or some kind of big deal, they might gave put out a press release that's available on some of the news sites. So not only go to the company's web site, but Google news or Yahoo news or whatever and see if you can find anything. If they company has gone through a big financial transition, such as a bankruptcy or maybe they've bought out some other companies, that's a good thing to talk about. Now talk about it positively. Don't say, "I heard you guys filed for bankruptcy last night and you guys must really suck." Don t' do anything like that, but just try to bring it up positively and show that you're interested, you're engaged and you're willing to be part of the team.

Thud: Plus it can be part of the negotiation process. I actually started working at a place and the day after I started, so this was announced before I was actually hired on, they split their stock. So when I was talking to them about stock options and stuff like that, through the offer process, that was something I could bring up, and I had to know how is this going to work. I'm going to be starting the day before the split, do I get twice as many options? Am I not part of the split? So doing that research is more than just for the interview, that can help you throughout the whole hiring process.


[music]

Seg: This week's Moment of Seg, we're going to talk about security jobs and ethics. As a System Administrator you kind of have a security job because you obviously have higher access to some systems in the company than other people do. When you're getting a new job there's a certain amount of ethical behavior that they expect and some of the stuff that you might not even think about.

Gek: I'm pretty focused on being a Systems Administrator and by virtue of wanting to be a Systems Administrator and knowing what the job entails, I take for granted the idea of ethics. I am trusted with a lot of information, some sensitive, some not. But there is a very real trust between my employer and me, our customers and me, and all three of us combined. There's a very real trust there that I'm not going to be malicious or I'm not going to be unethical or immoral in my actions. I am actually going to continue to support the system. Because I want to be a Systems Administrator, it just goes hand in hand for me. But it's important to understand that that trust is there and that you need to be ethical. It's a reality check for some people. To look at your job as a Systems Administrator as, "wow, I really am being looked to for answers and I'm trusted that the work I do is going to be to the best of my abilities and it's not going to be malicious behavior." It's very very important to be ethical as a Systems Administrator. And if you're not going to give it everything that you've got, if you're not going to support them to the best of your abilities, then you shouldn't be a Systems Administrator. If you have a doubt then you shouldn't do it at all. If you're going to go into a system and you're going to be jaded or you're going to be bitter about something and say, "well you know, this customer was angry at me for something that wasn't my fault, so I'm just going to shut down his application." If you ever have that thought, quit. Get out of it immediately because it's a lot of responsibility. It's a lot of trust that has to be there. If you can't give it everything, then you need to get out. It's not only going to be bad for the customer, and it's going to be bad for your company, it could be extremely bad for you. A simple command formatted the right way, it could mean not only the end of your job, it could mean jail time. It could mean going to court, something on your record forever. It could mean the loss of security clearance. You might be flipping burgers for the rest of your life. You might end up in jail for the rest of your life, depending on your circumstances. So you need to be very moral, you need to be very ethical, you need to be very focused on the job at hand and be willing to do the right thing to make everything work. As a Systems Administrator, it's a job I love, it's a job I want to do for the rest of my life. And I don't have a problem with it. I realize that that trust needs to be there. That respect needs to be there.

Seg: Yeah, I agree. One of the things at my job, I have access to a lot of things and I specifically go out of my way to try and limit that. If there's a particular system that somebody wants to give me access to, and as part of my job it would make it a little bit easier. But there are plenty of other people that can access that system and do that part of the job, I try to shy away from it and just tell them, "look I don't necessarily have to have that level of access." A good example is, I know my way around Windows enough that I could probably break any Windows machine there is, but I could probably fix a number of issues. I don't necessarily have to have domain level privileges in the office where I work because the bulk of my job is for the UNIX systems that are out there. So would it make things easier if I had the access? Yeah. If there was an issue that came up and I was on site at the time, I could fix it if I had access. But it's not business critical for me to have access to it, so I don't want access to it. The other thing I wanted to mention is that when it comes to authentication security, things like passwords and other methods of authentication, I go out of my way to make sure that I don't know anybody else's passwords. Even if they're entrusted to me in kind of... you know, if a huge disaster happens and my boss dies for some reason and I need his password in order to continue running the company, if he were to drop dead. Even if I have access to those, that doesn't mean I'm going to go look at them and know what they are until I absolutely need them. It just makes things so much simpler for me and it provides a higher level of trust that my employer knows that that's just not going to be an issue. Gek, do you have any thoughts on this?

Gek: To build on what Seg was saying, you don't want to be in a position where somebody know that you have knowledge to do great harm and doesn't trust you to not do it. Most of the places that I've worked know that I know some tricks; I know some of the black hat techniques. But I would never ever do it for any reason. I'm a very ethical person. I think, like Seg was saying, you kind of have to be if you're going to be a Sys Admin. You just need to not be the kind of person that would do something bad when nobody's looking. And that's more because other Sys Admins are going to have to clean up any mess that you create and lie about. It's not fair, it just makes more work for the other people.