Phasor Burn: The Official Unofficial System Administrator Oath
This is basicly a report of something the Phasor Burn blog linked to.
Very nice blog btw, and he linked to my related rant on there, thank you for that 🙂 The original is from an alt.sysadmin.recovery post from '99 by Mike Sphar, and it deserves reprinting:
I am hired because I know what I am doing, not because I will do whatever I am told is a good idea.
This might cost me bonuses, raises, promotions, and may even label me as “undesirable” by places I don’t want to work at anyway, but I don’t care.
I will not compromise my own principles and judgement without putting up a fight.
Of course, I won’t always win, and I will sometimes be forced to do things I don’t agree with. My objections will be made known.
If I am shown to be right and problems later develop, I will shout “I told you so!” repeatedly, laugh hysterically, and do a small dance or jig as appropriate to my heritage.
I am not sure its in our own best interest to actually show we feel rather self-satisfied at times when things do go wrong, but we all feel it of course. Sadly, within the complexities of corporate politics, its sometimes quite hard to show clearly how your the disregard of your advise is directly to blame for the issue at hand. But when our moment comes, savor it, but savor it privately 😉
Yes, there is a part of me that feels self satisfied in such situations, but the main take away should be that it is the opportunity to let management know this is a learning opportunity for them; maybe this type of flaming hairball of doom situation can be prevented or somewhat mitigated in the future if they would actually listen to the subject matter experts.
If they wanted to just hire monkeys, they should hire monkeys. Otherwise…
It’s our godgiven right to feel righteous and show it, considering we clean up the mess we told them could be prevented.
And perhaps some day they will look back and figure that your objections hold ground and actually listen to you. Well, one can always hope. 😉