by I’m in San Diego attending LISA this week. LISA is, by far, the most useful conference I’ve ever attended. It also happens to be the best place in the world to meet the authors of one’s favorite O’Reilly books. So far I’ve seen Tom Limoncelli, Randal Schwartz, Elizabeth Zwicky and AEleen Frisch roaming the halls. There are surely others that I’ve missed. I just wish that I’d brought all of my books with me.
One of the big things happening at LISA this year is LOPSA. LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators, was formed by the elected board of SAGE after USENIX decided to not turn SAGE in to a separate organization (it’s a very long story best saved for another time).
The big question right now is: what can LOPSA do for the system administration community? A lot of ideas are being thrown around but nobody has a definite answer just yet. This evening, I was fortunate enough to chat for a while with four of the LOPSA board members: Stephen Potter, Doug Hughes, David Parter and Trey Harris. After speaking with them, I’m convinced that the LOPSA board is willing to do whatever is necessary to make LOPSA a useful professional organization for system administrators.
I plan to be as involved in LOPSA as I have time for. In the near future I’ll be gathering opinions and attempting to write a coherent paper for aspiring system administrators. It seems that most system adminstrators fall in to the profession at some point or other which means that there is no clear path in to the field. For a programmer, a computer science degree is the simplest route to a job but, while helpful, it does not translate quite as well in to a sysadmin job.
Some of the questions that I will try to answer are:
* How have others entered the field?
* What do hiring managers look for in junior administrators?
* What are the essential skills for a junior UNIX admin, Windows admin or network admin?
This project will be just one of many geared at helping new admins enter the field and helping experienced admins advance in the field. One of the professional development projects that LOPSA hopes to undertake is to provide and promote guidelines for resumes. It’s been suggested that they do the same for job postings. A Birds-of-a-Feather session was held earlier tonight to discuss these possible resume standards.
The “low hanging fruit” for the resume project is to get people to start qualifying their skills. What this means is, instead of just buzzwords, qualify each skill so that the person reading the resume knows how to quantify your skill level. So instead of listing “C, C++, Perl and Ruby” on my resume I could say “familiar with Ruby and C++, conversant in Perl and fluent in C.” It would be very simple for employers to use the same type of qualifiers in job postings. Also, the qualifers are words that are meaningful to employers even if they aren’t familiar with the LOPSA standards.
I happen to think that this is a great idea for resumes and postings. This topic has always been a little murky for me because I know several programming languages and a handful of OSes but my skill levels are very disparate between them. I’ve used Fortran and Ruby but I program mostly in C and Perl and am very good with C. I don’t like just listing all of them because I don’t want a job programming in Fortran and am not qualified for a job programming in Ruby. I’ve used Linux but I write my own kernel mods on FreeBSD. In the past I’ve taken to listing a few skills in each area followed by “some experience with X, Y, Z.” The LOPSA resume idea is more refined. I believe Trey Harris is primarily responsible for this, Go Trey!
There are an infinite number of ways that LOPSA can help the community. Some people would like to see LOPSA pick up where the SAGE certification program left off. Others would like to see LOPSA inform law makers about technical matters so that legislation makes good technical sense. I would like to see LOPSA influence hiring practices so that I never have to work with another UNIX admin who doesn’t know what ‘cp’ does. Note to LOPSA and Santa Claus: I also don’t ever want to work with another network admin who can’t figure out how to turn on port monitoring, with a GUI, after I walked him through it the first time. Please, it’s all I ask. Keep the Xbox 360, just don’t make me bear the indignities of working with these people.
One of the key factors in making LOPSA useful is getting involvement from the LOPSA members. LOPSA members need to get involved to make this organization successful. I encourage any system or network administrator to join LOPSA not because of what it might become in the future but because they have a chance to shape what it will become.
Ask not what LOPSA can do for you but what you can do for LOPSA.
EDIT: If you have advice or experiences you’d like to share with aspiring sysadmins please email me: pdp11hacker at gmail dot com
EDIT part deux: The last line sounds a little cheesier now than I intended. I stand by it anyway; LOPSA wants to represent the community so whatever we do for LOPSA we also do for ourselves. Please, help out if you can 🙂