A lot has changed over the last two years, and with each change, we’ve grown further and further away from what we once called “business as usual.”
This year, we celebrate SysAdmin Day in a world that continues to be extraordinarily not normal, with life (and tech) constantly shifting and keeping us on our toes. The challenges we face as IT pros in general (and SysAdmins in particular) push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugarcoating it.
In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some thoughts for my incredible SysAdmins, without whom we would have been lost in the maze of the pandemic. Together, let’s reflect on and process the past years and prepare to navigate the challenges to come.
Practice Self-Compassion
This time last year, Australia had just entered what would become the longest lockdown of the pandemic. Though we believed such strict measures were behind us, and mask-free gatherings were beginning to be considered a safe option again, we were unknowingly stepping into a huge time frame of uncertainty and change. Having once more navigated a frantic shift to work from home, many of us in IT were initially confident a return to office was imminent in a few short weeks—little did we know these few short weeks would turn into four long months.
It’s easy now to look back and shake our heads in disbelief at our own naïveté. However, on this SysAdmin day, I’m here to tell you it would be a mistake to do so.
The urge to second-guess our past choices is proportionate with the criticality, if not the urgency, of a decision. And though so much of the work SysAdmins do can be considered both critical and urgent, the tasks over the last two years have taken it all to a completely different level. It only stands to reason the self-criticism has equally intensified.
With this in mind, my first piece of advice on this SysAdmin Day is to remember to practice self-compassion with our past selves. In every moment, as we face each new challenge, what sets us apart is our ability and willingness to do the best we can with what we have and what we know. We act now because to do otherwise would mean allowing things to become so much worse. Even as we accept none of our choices will ever be perfect, so too must we accept most of them will be very good; and more to the point, the vast majority will be “good enough.”
With the benefit of hindsight, I want you to recall how much we didn’t know and how long we didn’t know it. Yet we still had to make decisions, minute by minute and week by week. Sometimes we guessed wrong. But even so, our decisions got us to where we are today—in the process of building a new, more durable (and flexible) business as usual.
Forget Different—Choose Better
In the past, you may have worked at a company with a serious backlog of issues. Alongside a “healthy” supply of problems to solve, there may also have been a revolving door of crises to further distract the team. These weren’t simply pet peeves or minor inconveniences. These challenges required long hours, changes in processes, and the adoption or creation of new solutions.
You may have found when the latest crisis was brought to management, they delivered the answer of “give it until next quarter.” And to be fair, by the following quarter, the issue was likely no longer a focus—but not because it had been resolved. Instead, it had been eclipsed by the next five-alarm-fire-level problem.
Often, when management says, “Just give it until…,” they don’t mean to suggest the problem will get better next quarter. They mean eventually, you won’t have to deal with the problem anymore. Many cultures have a story similar to the phrase “This, too, shall pass”—a phrase simultaneously reassuring because no predicament lasts forever and cautionary because no period of joy is necessarily permanent. But when you’re faced with a never-ending parade of problems, knowing the current one won’t hang around long but will be replaced by an equally irritating issue is less than helpful.
So instead, be honest about your workflow. Solving problems, fixing issues, and finding solutions are a SysAdmin’s stock-in-trade. Nevertheless, one must strike a balance between fighting fires and clearing undergrowth so fires don’t happen in the first place.
Embrace the Change
There are a range of predictions circulating about the growing number of employees changing jobs in the coming year. You might be one of them. But even if you’re not, this trend is going to affect you.
I’ll elaborate on the last part first: if you have no plans to leave your current job because it’s everything you wanted, I say to you, without sarcasm or irony, “That’s wonderful.” It’s truly a delight to hear about folks who love what they do and the company where they’re doing it.
For many of us, part of the joy we feel about the work we do is the camaraderie with people who work with us. If many people leave (or if it feels like many people are leaving), it can create an emotional downward drag.
Though it’s great to get a lift from team spirit, it’s important as IT pros to remember we often must go it alone—not just in terms of working on projects or problems in solitude but deriving satisfaction from the work itself rather than seeking external validation. After all, if a server upgrades seamlessly in the dead of night and there are no CTOs to pat you on the back, did it really patch? Yes.
Departures from your team and the wider company will feel bittersweet, but if everyone’s running TOWARD something better, you can allow their success to temper the feeling.
And the inevitable uptick in account changes, password resets, new employee onboardings, and such? It’s an opportunity to streamline processes in need of a fresh coat of automation anyway, which is another chance for you to shine in the work you’re doing.
But maybe you’ve realised it’s time for a change yourself. That’s also OK. If this is one of your first moves, I want to share with you a useful tip: job changes in IT are more common than in other industries. The joke goes something like this: in other careers, if you change jobs every two to three years, by the third hop, HR is looking at your résumé and asking, “What’s the problem with this person?” In IT, if you HAVEN’T changed jobs every two to three years, when you do finally switch, HR will look at your résumé and ask, “What’s the problem with this person?”
If you’re ready for a change, embrace it.
Whether you stay or go; whether you’re able to achieve better or just something “different”; whether you can make peace with past missteps or even feel proud about past decisions—no matter which path you take in this endless choose-your-own-adventure career, I hope you can focus your energies on moving forward. Look at the coming months—with all the uncertainty they’re likely to hold—as another chance to make the best choices you can with the information and resources you have now.
This SysAdmin Day, the SolarWinds® family and I sincerely thank you for keeping our systems up and thriving over the last two years of uncertainty and challenge. We hope you have the best day your users and ticket queues will allow, filled with deserving celebrations in recognition of your hard work and achievements. Here’s to another extraordinarily not-normal year of facing and overcoming challenges, increasing knowledge and experience, and making things—in our professional and personal lives—better.
