The Worst Mistake that New Sysadmins Make

Don't make this lazy beginner mistake as a Sysadmin. Research your questions before asking:

-Getting error messages? Read them out loud.
-Google your best description of the problem.
-Scan the first few pages of results for matches.
-Try some of the suggested fixes and keep track of any changes in the behavior of your issue.
-Document what you've found, what you've tried, what you're expecting, what's actually happening, and what you're planning on trying.

Once you've done your homework like this, it's ok to interrupt someone to ask about it.

[Ulghart]

100 % agree with you. Asking everything is not only an annoying habit, but also the person who does it is taking away from himself the opportunity of learning. In my experience, you learn more and faster by thinking things yourself and finding solutions researching, than just asking it to your partner.

[XorAlex]

I have the opposite problem. I do not like to bother others, so I would try to solve a problem myself for many hours, before finally understanding that I may need help. Also, often to formulate a good question means 50% answering it. So, not having a good question, I would spend much time trying to understand what exactly am I trying to do and what exactly is not working.

[nqinadlamini]

I feel you man. Open office set-ups are the worst places to work for concentration requiring tasks. The disruptions are endless.
Thank You for the rant.

[mikerathbun]

All the people getting on him thinking he doesn't want to answer coworkers questions are missing the point of the video. There is a certain level of competency that everyone in operations needs to have (or any professional job). If you are having to ask an unreasonable amount of questions to your colleagues you now have caused your business to have two people being inefficient and not contributing to getting the mission done. Part of what makes someone a great dev or ops person is knowing how to find the right answer to solve a problem. Our junior devs are expected to explain the issue they are having and what they have tried and where they have looked before asking a Sr. dev a question. Taking someone out of the flow was a big issue for us and making the less experienced people (who get paid very well) follow these rules helped everyone and made them more resourceful and confident in their ability.

[fifothebot]

I wanna share an anecdote. I used to be the experienced guy at a company (and that's not me being smart, just that most others simply just came out of college and I worked for a couple of years).

It wasn't system administration though. I loved to be able to help. It's actually a really good feeling. It's actually why I got into IT. I wanna be able to build things that others can use. So like when I set up a blog I just like it when people are happy.

So yes, I actually was in a stance, where I mostly worked on other people's tasks. Not a problem cause we were always told that it's a team. I had a bit of a weird feeling, not really getting tasks assigned to me done, but it was okay, since people saw that I always was at other's desks and screens. I actually think that was the best to use my time.

Then one day something unexpected happened. The person sitting next to me, who was asking the most questions shared a link on slack. I don't have it right now, but I think he found it on Hacker News or so. It was exactly about this topic. It was about how asking a question brings people out of flow and how long it actually takes for people to get into this (and I think it was more like one or two hours). People started researching on their own. This had two interesting side effects. First of all, I got my tasks done and then really had full time to help others and actually pair up with them, rather than just context switching every few minutes. But what I find way more interesting is that people seemed to remember things better.

Now I always tried to give a tiny bit of relevant background. Not just "Here, write this...", but like "That's because ...., so if you do it like that it will work". I actually think that just searching on your own makes you learn faster/better.

So what that all led to in the end is that the whole "in between time", where you aren't focused on either of two tasks/problems/... now got freed up and could now be used for what we call "Dev Meeting" where when topics come up it would be explained to all the devs that attend it. And someone would write it down and people would never have to be scared of either asking or being interrupted.

There also was another team in the same company that didn't really do that. They did something else that worked for them, but feels a lot less like a team. What they did is they made a special room to sit pretty much alone in case you need to do something where you have a lot of time.

What I liked most about that is that the team got a lot of self esteem about work, which made all of us more motivated. People realized that I just know "everything", cause I read docs (websites, RFC, man pages, specs, whatever) and simply looked things up. I actually for a while was scared, because I felt like people would be super disappointed if I had to type "man find" or so.

And yes, I also used to think "If they just ask me we will finish the task faster", but it's simply not true. Not just because of the context switching, but also because looking up stuff and troubleshooting your problems are things that you really do learn by practice. And while that was logical to me, I really noticed that I kind of harmed the other's by being "the quick answer to various questions". They actually called me Google, dictionary, StackOverflow, etc.

And one last thing about docs. First: Bad/outdated docs are HORRIBLE. I agree. Call them out/fix them, cause you still need to have docs. Also what is important about documentation is that when they are good you actually learn concepts of how things work, therefor making you both more self confident and solving new problems. Sometimes people (and I do that too! A lot. Way more than good) see a command or a line of code and it solves their problem and they think they know what it does only to later find out that they completely misunderstood some fundamentals and usually it's something catastrophic on a Friday evening kinda preventing people from going home or something like that.

Anyway, that anecdote above is why I think he is right and that's actually a thing I wished I had learned earlier. It's not benefiting. It's not nice. I think simple questions that you can look up are okay, when you are not interrupting. And with simple I mean really mostly stuff where you are just as quick with google or man pages or so or simply less than the context switching costs the other person.

Asking questions is good, not putting any effort into answering your question is bad. Again, I mean "not any", I don't mean "google has 0 results" or "this is really out of the normal". And yes, that means that most people do that anyway. However, it can be dangerous, because it can become a habit and I am guilty of creating that, cause I really *LIKE* to answer questions and my coworkers know that. But now I am just writing on forums and wikis and so on and that' helps a lot more people :)

The video might be a bit less elaborate, but I think that's what he is trying to say. Look up flow and programming. I am sorry I don't know the exact link anymore, but here are two talking about this:


PS: Yes, old answers are bad. That's why I prefer official docs, specs and man pages. Most projects consider outdated or wrong docs just as what they are: Bugs.

EDIT: One more thing we did: We made it so that Do not Disturb on Slack means "Sorry, I really have to fix this bug, please only interrupt me when it's super important". And some people listen to music with headphones on as an additional layer. People actually like that.

[griffinb]

I call it paying the "context switch tax".

[williamna]

Reading over some of the comments here... sheesh. Do some self evaluation and figure out if you're the IT guy being annoyed by silly questions or the IT guy asking silly questions. If you were offended by this video... Bad news, you're the one asking.

[kevinryan]

These comments are ridiculous. He never said anything about not being allowed to ask questions. But if you can google an issue and find the answer in < 5 minutes YOU will benefit way more from that than asking someone else. Critical thinking is super important in the tech field and learning to quickly resolve your own problems will get you a lot further in your career.

[maxfriis]

These considerations are really important, but definitely not limited to sysadmin. This is what you should think and practice in all work relations. Good video.

[Flankymanga]

I was doing this a lot thinking that i am helping team to socialize. But then i found out that it really was annoying so i changed this and now i usually ask only questions i cannot find answer (hard questions) or it would take me hours of studying material.

[SteelmanArgument]

I agree quite a lot with what you're saying. It's ironic how information has never been this abundant and easy to access and people still post extremely simple questions everywhere on the Internet.
However, I don't really find it that bad to ask some simple technical questions in everyday life IRL unless the person in question is clearly busy. That's just some healthy chit chat :)

But I'm just studying to become a sysadmin right now so I guess that goes hand in hand, I guess it's a bit more intrusive when you're actually doing professional work.

[notes_at_dusk]

'No-one should ever be calling you...' *quick cut* I feel the pain.

[hamsoftware]

As a Solaris Unix support Engineer working for Sun I actually read man pages to people with support contracts. And that was 20 years ago. But I thought that they might be lonely system admins stuck in dark warehouse basements though. So I can empathize with their situation. I have some great stories....
If you read the documentation it makes you stand out as a knowledgable person. And really cuts through the BS in meetings.
I just got laid off after 21 years at Sun/Oracle. I guess I will be looking to do sysadmin on Linux. I like doing it more than coding.

[Locane]

Hey! Love the videos. I was hoping you could help me with something - I can't figure out how to make files list on separate lines, do you know the flag for that?

[musthavechannel]

Read docs, search google, interrupt your fellow is the "The good, the bad, and the ugly"

[FrancisRobert]

I totally hear you! I'm no expert and there's no one to teach me or mentor me, so I have always been googling and getting pretty good at it! :-) And thanks for your videos, learned a lot from you!

[jeremyheminger]

there are two sides to this equation. when I first started in programming I hated other programmers online because if I asked a question I was ridiculed. it's true that it taught me self reliance but I think the bullying also made me shy away from socializing online about technology and in some cases makes it difficult to ask questions when I really need to. soo ... the answer is out there, and learning the answer is better because you will actually understand the problem... but if someone asks a simple question... don't be a dick.

[SanMan]

I usually respond to questions like that with LMGTFY and a link. Passive aggressive but effective.

[EnderCrypt]

you know, thats some very good points ^^ thanks

[somebrains]

The era of working it out with just man pages is long over.