Linux Chick

I give you my days
You ask for my nights.

I give you my nights
You ask for my dreams.

I give you my dreams
You ask for my soul.
And there are some things you can not have.

I've always wanted you , I would watch you with my friends and I was envious. I was determined to have you. I worked restlessly to possess you, for years I toiled and you were my goal. Then one day you were mine, and I rejoiced.

You've changed. You are not for me what you were for them. You are cold and abusive. You take and expect, but you do not reciprocate. All I've asked is for you to accept and nurture me. Instead you have raped me.

And so i am lying here naked and bleeding. I had self respect, you stole it. I had self worth, you've stifled it. I've been here under you for years, as you slowly pound each desirable quality out of me. My mind has withered, you have made me exactly what you need. You have made me worthless to anyone else.

And I stay , scared to find something new. Scared of rejection. Scared you have made me worthless. I stay and you keep pounding, and it feels like you will never stop. At least not until I am completely used up.

I am broken. I am obsolete.

Dear Management,
I would like to take this time to remind you that I am necessary. I am a small cog in the machine that you call a company , but I am an important one. I support you. Whenever you call I come running because it's what I am supposed to do. I push your changes, I service your requests, I take on your projects and recover your outages. That is my role and I do it happily.

I would like to discuss, for a moment, what your role is. You are there to help me succeed, and by succeed I mean make me into the best cog I can be... for our company. It means providing me tools and resources. It means setting expectations between the rest of the business and myself, understanding my time, capabilities and limitations. It means being my filter and sometimes it means saying "No." to me and to the unrealistic expectations of others.

I am failing at my role, in large part because you are failing at yours. You have cut my legs out from under me. You have made it perfectly clear that you do not value me, that I am so easily replaceable in your eyes. That my knowledge which I have worked long and hard to develop is worthless. You are sarcastic and demeaning. You do not think before you speak and you contradict your own expectations of me. I am no longer sure how to do my job, you continue to change and redefine it and I can not keep up.

You place value on the things you should not. You dismiss the things you should not. You tear down the things you should not. You fix the things that are not broken. You let the things that are broken sit and rot. You are the festering disease within our organization. You will cause us to fail, and that is what brings tears to my eyes. I love our company, I love what we do and what we stand for. I love my role, or at least i did. I am afraid I cannot sustain our relationship much longer. Every day I am with you I die a little inside, and I know you don't care.

And so , in closing, I would like to inform you that as you destroy me from the inside out - you destroy a vital part of the core that makes the company strong. When I fall , you will fall. I truly hope you take note of this dire situation soon.

Respectfully yours,
Infrastructure

I had a group of friends my first year of college who were Systems Administrators at the local e-commerce call center. I happened to work there, and during my breaks I would go hang out with them. I never *ever* saw them do work. They would sit around arguing about the latest tech trend of the day, what's going on in politics, sometimes they would sit around and play a random MUD. It was around this time of my life, as an impressionable 16 year old girl, that I decided I wanted to be a Sysadmin 'when i grew up'.

Fast-forward 7 years... SUCCESS! Not only did I manage to land a Linux Systems Administrator position , I managed to land it at one of the leading enterprise companies in existence. Yay! right? Well, sort of. I have thousands of systems running on some of the most technically advanced hardware with hundreds of shiny new applications at my fingertips. In theory it's a dream come true. Here's the catch... I don't actually get to play with them much.

My friends failed to tell me one very important fact. When you work for a large company with stockholders and a corporate mindset, you work for a very different beast. Now I am stuck in a land of process, delegation and management. A land where shit rolls straight to the bottom and terms such as 'synergize' and 'low-hanging fruit' waft on every corner. I have been transformed from a pleasant, idealistic, bouncy teenager into a bitter, cynical morose admin. Welcome to corporate America. The process overhead leaves little time for the parts of the job I love. Some weeks it leaves no time at all.

I guess I wouldn't have a problem with all of this bull-snarky if it actually did any good. I would like to take this moment to list a few truths I find to be self-evident:

*The point of management, process and change control is to ensure a stable environment.
*A stable environment is well thought out , carefully architected and meticulously executed.
*Time is required to:
* Navigate process and change management
* Build a stable environment
* Maintain a stable environment
*There are a finite number of hours in a week, and a finite number of human resources on any given Infrastructure Operations team.

So here is where I have a complete disconnect in understanding management's thought process. Every business unit in the company wants some shiny new service. Our customers require ( rightfully ) a stable, usable environment. Our direct management wants a track-able paper trail for everything that we do. We are given no say in the tools that we use, and so are resigned to working around whatever buggy software suite gave the prettiest presentation. Every project is tracked in *at minimum* three separate places. And no one with any power is willing to say 'enough is enough, NO'.

And now, with all of that, we are stuck in a situation where no one is happy. The environment is not stable ( FAIL ). There have been no scale-backs on new projects. This means there is no time to make the environment stable. AND projects are not being completed because human resources are being pulled off of them to try and put out fires from the previous fail. (FAIL ). Neither customers nor business units are happy ( See last 2 FAILs). Management is trying to appease the end users with more process and paperwork that the the Operations Team has to complete. This is taking away from time that should be used to fix the real problem. ( FAIL ) They are surprised this is not working. FAIL FAIL FAIL!

I will end this rant with a quote by Tony Blair:
"The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes."