Originally Posted by zxmaus

Hi Guys,

I am one of the non-existent female UNIX SAs (according one of the threads above ), and I am working in a global company as a Senior SA, based in UK.

I am since 22 years in IT, had a lot of different jobs before including IT Trainer, Windows SA, Hardware technician, Networker, DB developer and others.

I started in my current company when they introduced AIX 4 years ago, and I am a dedicated AIX SA, not touching any Solaris-, HP- or Linux box what is probably not the norm at all. I am as well not responsible for Web- or DB support - thats responsibility of other teams.

My jobdescription tells me I have a 35 hrs job - 9-5, 1 hr break and 23 days holidays - and I am meant to be oncall 1 week out of 6. That is what I am payed for and my salary is probably pretty average for my position in UK.

So far the theory

And here comes reality: I am primary responsible for about 200 AIX Servers and since I was starting that early, I am treated as the person-to-go for everything about AIX - so I am co-responsible for about 500 more AIX boxes globally.

I am working in a team with 2 other SAs + Teamleader (who keeps the paperwork away from me) - thanks to the recent personal reductions - so my team is now smaller than eg 3 years ago where we had to care about 15 servers.

All our servers are following strategic decisions, that are for some weird reasons changed about every 3 months - that means that I hardly have more than 2 environments setup after the same standards. About 25% of my servers are application servers, everything else is running Databases (oracle/sybase)

We have to cover 24/7 support for all our servers and that means we have always 2 persons oncall.

We have to cover everything that requires root access - installations, OS- and application upgrades, application support, trouble shooting, disaster recovery, system builds, capacity- and performance management, we are the primary port of call for our customers, project managers, architects and many other things.

A normal working day for me starts usually at 6:00 am from home with code releases and a quick health check on the most critical systems that needs to be reported to management before 8 am - and a quick catchup with emails.

Once the report is completed, I move to my office, another look into emails and working on voicemail and problem tickets.

Being in the office means being available - via phone, messenger and email - and for the hundreds of personal questions the DBAs, Webguy or any other team has. That means being asked permanently to do quickly this, have a look there. It means as well participating on countless conference calls regarding the next change, the next major upgrade, the next project, the next strategy or the next go live or the current production outage. It does NOT mean to get anything normal or planned done during normal business hours.

When everyone else is leaving the office around 5pm, I find the time to start any kind of planned work - like the patching of the uat or dev environment, the monthly capacity review of environment A, the hardware request for environment B or to commence the system build of environment C. I really cannot recall when I left my office last time before 7pm, usually its around 8.30, 9pm - sometimes much much later.

Weekends are occupied with Production work. Every upgrade, every install (scheduled by us or any other team), every migration, every disaster recovery test, every go live happens on the weekend.

All this doesnt include the countless hours spent solving major production issues like corrupted production databases, the unexpected slowdown of application x, or the hours and hours spend in conference calls for production outages where a lot of different teams have to do their part to solve the problem.

So my working-hours are ususally 100+ per week + oncall every second week.
Holidays are rather illusive, I have taken off (including weekends) exactly 4 days last year

And still, if you ask me, I really do love my job - and I really don't want to do anything else. I never had a job that challenging, that rewarding and with that much fun.

After all - and though the whole position is very technical, you still get in touch and have to cooperate with so many people every day, that it never feels that technical. And honestly - it never feels like having worked so many hours since time passes very fast as long as you're busy - and believe me you always will be

If you consider being a System Administrator you should ask yourself
- are you patient enough to deal with hundreds of seemingly stupid questions every day, explain the same things 10 times with different words until you're understood, spend hours on conference calls for production issues well knowing that its not the fault of your system at all
- are you willing to learn something new every single day in your life
- do you want to live a life never too far from a phone and an internet connection since there will be lots of occasions where you are called to do something only you could do

Kind regards
zxmaus