Ironic timing for this article, via Slashdot…
The author believes that a plague of systems adminstators is crippling business, and software development in particular. I’ve seen this happen (from a distance) so I can’t deny it, but I’ve also seen it go the other way too - in my opinion the greatest threat to an organisation’s data security is a project manager with a deadline: “Just open the firewall for it!”
The article is a mix of reasonable points badly presented, and plain whining, but the comments following it address that just fine, so I won’t bother. I did find this part particularly spot-on, though:
Firstly, the true cost of administration must be accounted for when totalling up the cost of any project. Administration dead-time is a significant and growing aspect of all projects I have witnessed in the past 5 years. Dead-time waiting for software to arrive, files to be undeleted, versions to be mandated: it all needs to be added up and made explicit.
The curse of systems administration is that only the bad sysadmins and the absent sysadmins are visible. A good sysadmin fades into the background, sadly.
Link: Role Fragmentation
(Article starts with an unpleasant picture of an unfortunate donkey)
