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Donna Garverick wrote:
> what i see of the unix admins is a very stand-alone,
> don't-ask-for-help kind of attitude.
In addition to this potentially just being a "guy thing" (don't ask for
help, don't ask for directions), this is generally true of practitioners of
any occult art. The value is in knowing what someone else does not. This is
one of the differences between the company that our office used to be, and
who we are becoming as part of CGI (no plug intended, this was also my
experience with another big name consulting firm). The old perception of too
many was that their value lie in being the only one who knew a certain
technology. I got told as much, that since I was hired for my 3000 skills,
and was the only person in the office who knew the 3000, I had job security.
So some found it odd that I was so willing to share anything I knew that
someone else might find useful. And that's the new mindset: one's value is
in the number of different things one knows (and which one will, this
quarter, draw the highest billing rate).

When our 3000 went away, friends warned me to be nervous about my
employment. However, I developed a reputation in that time for general
usefulness, by asking some intelligent questions about technologies I did
not know (along with some profoundly clueless questions), and for quickly
learning things that were new to me. Now, let me say that this is a real
mixed blessing, although you'll have to ask me at HP World why that is (I'm
not about to state that opinion in durable form). Why I had that reputation
may be answered by the other thing that Donna wrote:
> someone, who's opinion i respect, said to me that mpe people tend to be so
well
> grounded in the fundamentals of computers -- from programming to admining.
as
> a whole, we're very good with/knowledgeable about computers.  otoh, unix
people
> aren't necessarily as well versed in what makes computers computers.

Roy Brown wrote:
> Don't forget, when we learned MPE skills, we were building a career
> path. For today's Unix admins, learning MPE is just time out, alas.
See above. I work with some (at least one too many) people who insist that
they are only one thing, and one thing only, and can barely tolerate using
their PCs to run email and one terminal emulator to get to their "real
computer". A couple of these still hit [Enter] at what they perceive to be
end of line in an email (and it's not to comply with RFCs or 80 char lines),
and indent each new line with eight spaces. I wrote a script to PGP encrypt
a file, and ftp to it to a business partner. At some point, one of the
programmers emailed me the file's copybook. That's a pretty severe case of
just not getting it.

Just about ANY useful knowledge will give one perspective on those things
they already know. I've learned most of what I know about a mainframe here,
even bits of JCL here and there, and it makes me appreciate MPE that much
more. ;-) And my appreciation of and respect for big iron in various forms
is likewise improved. But it also makes me think about scripting, and
standards, and files, and file systems, and... If an UNIX admin cannot
leverage their knowledge of UNIX to quickly learn another OS, I question how
well they really understand UNIX.

Then again, I remember my disappointment when our local SoftPro bookstore
had no general book on system administration, not of a particular OS, but
what it meant to actually admin a system, more philosophy and best practices
than details of implementation. We could stand for someone who understands
this to take up this cause! (Jon Diercks, do you have plans for another
book?)

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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