The Profession of System Administration

We'll conclude this book as we began: by considering the system administrator's job, this time considering it as a profession.

I find system administrators to be a very interesting group of people. One of the reason is that system administrators as a group tend to have diverse and varied backgrounds. Many people come to system administration after being educated and/or working in other areas. It's only relatively recently that system administration has been available as an "official" educational track and career path.

Whatever their backgrounds, though, system administrators are valuable technical professionals, and they should be treated as such (and also should act accordingly). Sadly, the contributions of system administrators are not always respected or even noticed. The way to address this oversight lies in greater visibility for the profession as a whole.

SAGE, the System Administrators Guild, is an organization that works very hard at doing just that. It also provides many valuable services to the individual system administrators that are its members.