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The Ultimate Systems Administrator doesn’t exist. There’s always someone better than you at something - or some aspect of it. But don’t ever let that stop you trying.

I wont let it stop me from trying to paint a portrait of this fictional server-ninja.

I’ll take the best traits from the best SA’s I’ve ever worked with, from myself if I have to, and where that falls short… I’ll put down what I wish we had - with the full benefit of hindsight. Strap in - we’re gonna do a little genetic engineering, a little personality engineering, a little training and a lot of building the ultimate career.

The Ultimate Systems Administrator - a Genetic Experiment Gone Horribly Right

Imagine you are the ultimate systems administrator.

You are highly intelligent. You love computers, and have been messing with their inner workings since childhood. You understand them backwards now.

You are extremely strong with your chosen operating system and software platforms. You know them inside out. You respond to mailing list queries on them, and maybe you write articles. You are a recognised authority in these circles.

Yet, you will willingly attack any task or problem asked of you. You never say “no, not my field”, but instead always “I don’t know it but I will after this!”. You can always be relied upon to give it a go - you are our backup person in a lot of areas.

You are brutally pragmatic with technology. If something better than your favourite tool comes along, you are the first to want to adopt it and let go of the old. You are sceptical and will prove it does the job first, but you will jump at the chance to improve your arsenal. You ask: What works? What’s the best? What fits our business the best?

You are obsessed with learning new technologies, new software, new hardware, new techniques. You are fearless in saying “I don’t know but I’ll find out” and tireless in pursuing that knowledge.

Yet, you also understand people. You like people and are a helpful person - always seeking to ensure that your customers both internal and external to our business are satisfied. You understand business too, and you like business. You accept the business’s priorities and recognise that together we stand, or together we fall. You know you are the meeting point between computers, people and business. You’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to apply technology and make things better.

You’re an expert in networking. Not necessarily hands-on router configuration, but you understand how tcp and udp work, you know what an arp packet is and you can picture how a network has to function without trying. You can see the packets.

You are highly trained. You hold qualifications from industry leading organisations, and you made the absolute most of that training - becoming an expert at the top of your field.

You have an almost uncanny ability to sense and work around problems; a trained intuition built on years of experience with every kind of issue, fault and artefact. You’ve seen it all, and when you see something new you learn immediately - continually refining your spooky abilities. You are direct when it works, indirect when it doesn’t. You let nothing stop you from getting the system working and keeping it working. Then you go back and you find out why, and you stop the problem coming back.

When there is an outage, you take it personally. You lose sleep because you have an idea on how to prevent the next one at 2am that night. You don’t lose sleep worrying about it.

You can handle the pressure. Any pressure. When you feel your human limits approaching, you adjust your expectations and your language to pace yourself. Not “I need to complete this by Friday” but “I want to complete this by Friday”. When you’re at 100% capacity, you recognise that you’re at capacity, let people know and accept it. Deadlines will slip - operational work will disrupt your projects. But the tasks will all, eventually, get done. You will stay at 100% until then. You don’t try for 110%, or 105%, or 101% and burn out. 100%, sustainable indefinitely.

You have excellent work and time management habits. Whenever you agree to do something you enter it into the ticketing system, or put it on your to-do list, or you scribble it down until you do. Nothing ever slips through the cracks. Every task is noted, every task is completed.

In your mind is a huge priority tree, encompassing every system and every part of our business. Project work, operational work. Service Level Agreements, internal needs. Loss of income vs loss of reputation. If thirty priorities conflict in a given day, you sort them out methodically and consistently on your priority tree and get them done in the right order.

You can draw our business’s entire Information System, including the parts you never work on, at a high level on a whiteboard from memory and understanding without pause, explaining to an audience how it all connects and works, and why as you draw. You can put names and faces next to each component you’ve ever touched upon - and explain what they know, when to go to them and why they are important.

Finally, you have a downright powerful moral compass. Your ethics are unquestionable. If you’re ever asked to do something you’re uncomfortable with you’ll politely refuse, explain why you can’t, and offer alternatives. Millions of dollars run under your fingers every day - you have to know right from wrong with absolute, and personal, certainty.

When you’re all of that, drop me a line - I’ll find room for you wherever I am, somehow.

Seriously though - no one person can do all of that, perfectly, every day. However, you can try; and why not? Why settle for what you are now when you can continue to grow towards The Ultimate?

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