IT Underwire

Systems Administrators in Information Technology (IT) are so misunderstood.

I know. Poor little me. And what about the artists and bankers and short-order cooks and politicians and custodians and lawyers ...? I'm aware of the fundamental fact that any idea that we have chosen to identify ourselves with is going to be misunderstood by the vast majority of “the others,” which are the people who haven't chosen to identify themselves with our idea.

And in point of fact, most of the generalities that anybody complains about are simply not true. I'll stick close to home so that there is some chance that I'll know what I'm talking about.

SysAdmins (who tend to abbreviate things for convenience and because a lot of us are not touch typists -- See? I can't even get through the first generality without abusing you with another) are under valued.

There are several possible aspects to “under valued.” The first is the obvious aspect of being underpaid. I don't have any recent facts about this. I know that I'm not under paid. I am comfortably in the middle of the middle class. I won't be retiring on the proceeds of my previous decades, and probably won't be on those of my next decade. As far as value versus pay, I'd place myself comfortably in the middle of the field. I am skilled and reasonably talented and do a good job keeping my department working. The pay is pretty well aligned with my guess of my worth to the department.

So if my personal experience is a guide than I would have to say that there is probably a broad spectrum in pay. I know SysAdmins that are definitely not being paid what they are worth and I've met some that are overpaid for the little skill and effort they bring to their jobs.

Value versus pay swings about according to fashion. I was a SysAdmin when tech companies were booming, when all it took to dot your com was the ability to use three words of technical jargon correctly in a sentence. Nobody had made a company using this new technology and every idea was fresh, new, untried, and possibly connected via the Internet to the pot at the end of the rainbow. There was a lot of imagination in the pay scales for everyone associated with IT and people who never imagined it were getting rich.

Then somebody shouted that the Emperor was naked. Suddenly, having an idea for something that could be done “on the Internet” was met with a firm introduction to the outside of the front door.

But business had changed in a subtle way. Computer technology hadn't been satisfied with firing the imaginations of a generation. So what if a thousand companies that had never had a physical product to to sell vanished in an eye blink? A thousand other companies who already had good brands and solid products had adopted computer technology because it made their products cheaper and more dependable and yes, with a little imagination, expanded the capabilities of those products beyond what anyone had thought possible.

In 2000, a local computer repair shop might have a web address in its phone book entry right next to its telephone number. But a few years later if your local lumber store didn't have a web address, the customers went looking for a store that did. The ones that did have a web address could show us with a few clicks that they were a better lumber store, because their computers taught us about their business.

Those few years were lean for people in IT. When the dotcom reset button got poked, there were a few extra applicants around for every position. As in roughly 20 to 1 if you were in a major metropolitan area. That number comes from my own experience looking for work between autumn of 2002 and summer 2003. One job I applied for had 25 applicants on the first day and they only intended to interview 3. And the salary on offer was about a 40% pay cut from what I'd had before.

That lean period was nearly the death of SysAdmins. We knew that nearly any company could be made better with the right amount of computer infusion because we had seen it. But companies that were outside the computer industry had been burnt too badly by wild optimism and over-investment. Or if they hadn't invested in computers at all, they were greatly satisified to have weathered the dotcom failure with no loss on the books. Convincing them that there was an amount of computerization that was appropriate for their industry was a challenge, particularly when you had come in the door, hat in hand, looking for work.

The fact that today everyone knows what a web address is shows that essentially every business has a computer aspect. It's like having a cash register. Or a telephone. Or an accountant. Do you buy or lease a cash register? Should you have a multi-line phone or is one enough? Can your business keep an accountant busy full time?

Business has more than a century of experience with accountants. It is pretty well established what they do for you and what they are worth to a business and roughly how their services work.

There are accountants that specialize in restaurants. They can speak restaurant lingo and they can ease a new owner into some understanding of how accounting works for them.

If you are running a restaurant, there is almost no one who can tell you accurately how much computer hardware and SysAdmin support you need.

And so far, SysAdmins mostly speak computer lingo and nothing else. That's partly because it takes so much lingo to speak accurately about computers and partly because we fear to get specialized in the part of our job that is outside of the computers. 10 years ago, if you were specialized in computers, you were nearly unemployable. If you were specialized in computers for, say, restaurant operations, you were going to night school to learn an employable skill, despite your higher degrees.

I started this talking about the “under paid” aspect of being under valued. Questions remain about the value of SysAdmins in general. And I can't give an answer to that. And I would contend that no one else can either. Most of the businesses that adopted computer technology in the last 10 years did so when computer hardware was plummeting in price and skyrocketing in capability and at the same time, the human beings capable of installing and supporting that hardware were desperate to feed themselves after looking for work for several years.

The amount that businesses spent on the people associated with computers was too high in the 1990's and it was too low in 2000's. We haven't seen Baby Bear's salary range yet.

There is also the fact that when computers are involved, the last five years counts as both a hard and fast tradition and also mostly obsolete practices.

How long did it take for touch-tone phones to completely replace rotary phones? Was it more than 20 years to tip the balance toward mostly touch-tone? That can never happen in an industry touched by computers. If you hold on to your 20 year old computer hardware, you risk seeing a brand new competitor do the same thing with a system that when brand-new costs 1/100th the amount you pay just to keep the old stuff running.

And if your own SysAdmins show you how you can replace that Jurassic computer equipment with modern stuff that requires less support and performs many times better, all you notice is that you don't need them to support your dinosaur, now that the mammals have taken over. So you let them go.

I feel emotionally certain that your bottom line is wrong. Your SysAdmin added all that value to your business--that's what they were hired to do. Credit them with it and encourage them to keep trying to add value.

Employees used to simply get more valuable the more experience they had in the field. You could often assign value simply based on years of experience. An employee in their fifties is at their peak in experience and maturity and they often see the company they are with as the place they will be until retirement, so they want to help make it successful so they can be successful with it.

In the IT world, a SysAdmin has to be able to support the latest tech and that tech has completely changed within the last 5 years. The first business thought is, just as the old computers are obsolete, so are the SysAdmins. “We have to hire new SysAdmins that know the new stuff.” Besides, the new guys are cheaper because we pay based on years of experience and they haven't got any.

The first generation of SysAdmins are those employees in their fifties. These are the ones that have survived at least 3 rounds of “the tech has completely changed within the last 5 years.” They learned the new tech and fit it into your business environment. Twice. Adding value each time. Business can and should see them exactly the way they see employees in other fields. Their value grows with their experience.

Businesses still remember how much had to change to integrate computers into industries that only computer geeks thought should be computerized 10 years ago. And they remember how many good people in their employ couldn't make the change.

But these 5-year tech shifts are not the same class of change. The job of the SysAdmin stays the same through these changes. You thought you hired them to support brand X, software Y, and computer Z, so you think you need new SysAdmins when you change X, Y, and Z. But you hired them to support your business on computers. They know your business and they know computers. They help you decide when to replace XYZ with ABC. They don't yet know ABC perfectly, but what they know about your business is what matters. Knowing computers helps them pickup ABC quickly.