July 2008 Archives
When I start reading a blog, I almost always go through the entire blog looking for clues about the person writing. So I thought I'd start my blog with some information about who I am and why I would blog about it. I'm a system administrator at Penn State. I'm also female, which means a lot of times when I go to meetings with other system administrators, I kind of stick out. There don't seem to be a lot of female system administrators, or at least there don't seem to be a lot who go to the meetings I go to. I wonder why that is at times, but then other times, the frustration level gets high enough that I understand completely why people wouldn't willingly jump into this.
It's not easy to be a system administrator anyway, and I've learned in my current job that I'm not a real system administrator. In my prior life, I was a Windows monkey, pushing buttons in the pretty GUIs that Microsoft gives to server administrators, GUIs that lulled me into thinking I knew how to administer a system. Now I know better. I used to program. I used to do everything at a command line. I used to do basic Novell administration and Lotus Notes administration and database development. But I seem to have lost a lot of those skills in the years I was doing 100% Microsoft. I'm feverishly working to relearn a lot of the skills that have fallen by the wayside. I want to be a geek again and I want to know things I didn't know before. More importantly, I want to be able to learn things that will help me develop the skills I feel like I'm terribly behind with so I can do my job well. I don't like feeling like a fraud.
I left an IT Manager position to do system administration. I loved being an IT Manager. I was good at it. Not to brag, but I fell into the job and found that it just came naturally to me. The mentoring, the ability to build teams, to gain cooperation within and between the silos, and the occasional need to kick a little butt to get things done. It wasn't something I had to struggle to learn, but in managing, I felt my skills slipping and I felt like more and more of my time was being taken up with what can only be described as babysitting duties, things I've never seen a male IT Manager have to do. So I took a step back with the intention of stepping forward again when I find something that is a good match for me, when I find a group who can use my ability to rally the troops. In the interim, I'm hoping to gain as much technical knowledge as I can, to learn to use the technologies I've so long supported but never really used, and I'm going to use this blog as a journal of my struggles.
Sometimes I might complain. Sometimes I might rant. Hopefully sometimes there will be triumphs here that someone other than I will be willing to celebrate!
It's not easy to be a system administrator anyway, and I've learned in my current job that I'm not a real system administrator. In my prior life, I was a Windows monkey, pushing buttons in the pretty GUIs that Microsoft gives to server administrators, GUIs that lulled me into thinking I knew how to administer a system. Now I know better. I used to program. I used to do everything at a command line. I used to do basic Novell administration and Lotus Notes administration and database development. But I seem to have lost a lot of those skills in the years I was doing 100% Microsoft. I'm feverishly working to relearn a lot of the skills that have fallen by the wayside. I want to be a geek again and I want to know things I didn't know before. More importantly, I want to be able to learn things that will help me develop the skills I feel like I'm terribly behind with so I can do my job well. I don't like feeling like a fraud.
I left an IT Manager position to do system administration. I loved being an IT Manager. I was good at it. Not to brag, but I fell into the job and found that it just came naturally to me. The mentoring, the ability to build teams, to gain cooperation within and between the silos, and the occasional need to kick a little butt to get things done. It wasn't something I had to struggle to learn, but in managing, I felt my skills slipping and I felt like more and more of my time was being taken up with what can only be described as babysitting duties, things I've never seen a male IT Manager have to do. So I took a step back with the intention of stepping forward again when I find something that is a good match for me, when I find a group who can use my ability to rally the troops. In the interim, I'm hoping to gain as much technical knowledge as I can, to learn to use the technologies I've so long supported but never really used, and I'm going to use this blog as a journal of my struggles.
Sometimes I might complain. Sometimes I might rant. Hopefully sometimes there will be triumphs here that someone other than I will be willing to celebrate!
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Chris Kauffman on Who am I and why would I blog?: In referen