What does an IT guy or sysadmin do? Well, I kind of know, but what is it like?

Well, im an intern for Information Systems right now, sitting at my job.

Its a whole lot more interesting than programming, unless programming interests you.

Administrating allows for business travel, and more contact with people, and different areas of the company.

I first planned on getting a degree in programming, but have since moved to Information Systems. Programming was described to me as code crunching 8 hours a day solo, or in a team. If you enjoy this, then so be it.

The business aspects of management allow for more variety on a daily basis.

IT does more of sitting around waiting for a helpdesk complaint to be filed, then searching google for resolutions

Sys Admins do installs internally, and externally.

Both require a lot of sitting around on the computer and waiting for something to be installed/repaired.

A system admin's job scope

- more of dealing with computers, maintainance either it's hardware & software, basic networking, & basically maintains the systems of computers or servers.

- knowing how to deal & work wth various types of computers & other devices like printers, scanners, fax etc helps too

- usage of various types of Operating Systems & programs besides Windows, Linux, Unix also helps.

- armed with certs. like MCSE, Cisco Certificates ~ CCNA, CCNP etc. well recognized as well.

I wouldn't say there would be much programming being a sysadmin/IT guy it's more of troubleshooting, configuring & maintainance.

While being a programmer is more R & D of codings, databases, softwares & etc. Although if you're passion is more towards programmer; then why not consider the option of being a software programmer or software engineer (this deals wth both programming & managing comp.systems & servers).

I am deliberately working at what in the computer world is known as a "small shop" because I get to do it all.

* Programming Analysis

* Operations

* Computer Security

* Help Desk support

* Testing

* Data Forensics

* Performance Enhancement

* Archives Management

You name it in IT and I do it. That is only possible in a "small shop" where there are very few IT employees to do it all. Now it so happens that when it comes to hardware hookups, I have 4 thumbs and 1 finger on each hand, so I am fortunate in having an IT co-worker who is good at that aspect of the business.

I enjoy the diversity of activities, but find Programmer Analyst to be the most fun ... some need is epressed, or suggested ... I use my knowledge of the entire corporate computer system to figure out how to get at what they want ... a conceptual picture, get the code to implement that, test it, verify the data there is not misleading.

In any new program that I create, 99.99% of the code is copied from earlier programs that were developed for the company. It is like a jigsaw puzzle. We need to do A B C and D. Let's get the "A" from that sales forecast program we wrote 3 months ago. Let's get the "B" from that report we did last year for the autitors to identify inventory sitting idle. So we end up with 99.99 % of the source code already provided, and the actual new coding needed to glue that together is interesting, not really time consuming. Then the result is tested, I view it.

I think to do my job well, I need to be a bit of an artist with data presentation. How to make it appear or be arranged so it is self evident to the user what's what, with little or no oportunity for people to misconstrue what they are seeing.

Assuming you can qualify, it is perhaps the most stimulating work in the world.

Most other jobs are somewhat boring. You do the same thing every day, You get real good at it, but when you say you have 10 years experience at whatever, it is really the same year ten times, or the same day 2500 times.

But in IT there is no day that is like any other day.

Here's what my last week has been like:

* We have had a historical problem with vendors charging us excess billing & I have been developing a set of programs that I call my "smoking gun" collection, to list cases of where we got billed excess fees ... I currently have a score of loose ends to figure out ... I have figured out about 100 incidents this last week, where what happened was something I was familiar with, but there's a bunch that fall into new scenarios ... it is not good enough for me to figure out what the heck happened, I have to design systems to prevent things from falling through the cracks, so that we can attain the best possible data quality with respect to supply chain finances

* There's a report used to manage factory production that they wanted total shipments for last 3 months added to, for helping with lot sizing .... I got that working for them after tweaking & running half a dozen tests & each time tweaking to further improve appearance & now that report runs each morning inccluding Saturdays, which will be first test of automating the report, so I will be checking on that this weekend, to make sure it did not get stuck.

* One of our customers has outsourced their finances to a place that needs electronic invoices, but before they will supply us with specific technical details to try a test, there has been a mountain of questions we have to answer ... I work my way through the answers, then they have mountain of new questions

* The auditors asked for some $ figures on 2006 and the accountants could not find the data, so they asked me ... even though the data was cleared to zero at year end, I was able to get them a report showing total $ by vendor spent in the fiscal year 2006, sorted from biggest $ downwards ... I pointed out that this was the whole year 2006, not since the company got new owners ... I also threw in a report showing what the $ totals were as of when the new owners came on board, and put the data in a format that could be imported into Excel if anyone wanted to subtract the difference

* The IRS asked for a detail list of our 2005 postings to General Ledger ... the boss said he searched through old records and could not find any such report ... well no wonder, we nver print that ... I generated a report listing 100% of the transactions involved, and single spaced it ran to 5,000 pages of what we call green bar paper, which is 70 lines on a page and 200 characters across the page ... I put this into a text file to attach to e-mail but apparently some ISP e-mail systems can choke on an attachment that is 35 meg in size, so we put it on a CD Rom and sent that instead

* From time to time, some government agency sends our company a statistical report to fill out, and everyone sends these to the IT guy to figure out the data to fill in the form & I guess I end up with one of these every 2 weeks or so. After filling out, we make a copy, and send it in. A month later we get notice from government saying they never got it, all kinds of penalties if this not been sent in. I have now sent some of them in 4 times & been begging management for permission to send registered mail, and I am just about at the point of me doing one registered mail without permission. But then I got a phone call from a government agent following up on one that I signed as the person who filled it out, so I know they got one of them. I got him the additional info he needed, but he told me that this form should have been filled out by our Treasurer or Chief Financial Officer. I told him that he was living in a fantasy world, that first off, the government form ant the instructions on how to fill it out, no place do they say what officer of the company has to fill it out or get the data, second that whoever you ask to fill it out, they are sure to ask the IT guy to dig out the data, and third for the time period you were asking for, our company did not have a Treasurer or Chief Financial Officer. Our company went for about five years, using outside accounting firms to perform the kinds of services that such a person would do for us.

* At one of our customers, there has been a change in personnel, and there is a new guy who has no idea what vendors do a good job of supplying whatever parts they might need ... now we are in a competitive world where many customers do not have good records on where they got their stuff because they are constantly shopping around for better prices, faster delivery, better quality, all sorts of criteria ... so our sales rep for that customer needed a list of all the parts we have ever made for them ... I was able to whip up such a list pretty fast & e-mail it to him, asking if this is "good enough" or do we need more info, in which I made some remarks about risks when matching files without relevant data ... turned out what I whipped up was "good enough" to get the new customer employee what he needed.

* I am on 24 hour help desk emergency support ... I get a call that a particular PC has locked up while in the middle of running ...... Ok I have heard that story before ... Please get everyone off of ..... certan applications & give me about 10 minutes & I will let you know when they can get back on ... the situation here is I know from experience what happens when certain people are accessing shared data base from a PC that locks up due to the usual Microsoft nonsense on a PC that does not have enough gas to do all the stuff the employee has been loaded with ... and I have written some programs to do a mass rebuild to repair the data base damage, but I want other applications out of the data base while I am running this ... so then I call back & turns out we need to do a bit more tweaking on the interconnections with the PC that got hung up, but maybe 20 minutes after the first phone call to me, the crisis is over

* We bought some software & I been struggling to copy it from one operating system to another & getting some very strange error messages ... I am beginning to suspect some software has not been installed, for security by obscurity reasons

* Now I am not listing all the stuff I did last week, just what kind of sticks in my mind as being somewhat interesting

In the programming area, to do my job effectively I do need to know about a dozen different programming languages ... a few main number crunching data processing heavy duty languages, ways involved in design of packages of data elements ... tables, files, etc.for relational data bases and other data structures, menu design, communication of data, job control language, message files ... this is because the typical software that I work with will have pieces in different programming languages

Many years ago at a company party, I met a relative of one of the owners of the company, who asked me what I did, and I knew from past contact with him that he knew next to nothing about computers or technology. I said

Think of the company as being on a train hurtling over a business landscape with opportunities rising up all over the place that we need to grab. Think of the computer system as being the locomotive pulling the company across that landscape, and think of the train tracks as being the connections between all the workers and all of our potential customers and vendors. I am the engineer for all of that. I am laying tracks to where the company needs to go. I am stocking the fires of the locomotive so that it can go faster and faster. Occasionally a bridge goes out, or we run off the tracks. I get us back into the journey as rapidly efficiently and cost effective as is possible.

You need data to run the company, I make improvements in the tools we use to access that data productively, so that instead of using a report listing all the details, you get just that which needs to drive decisions.

Mistakes happen. I find and fix mistakes. In quality control, it is important not just to fix things that got broke, but to figure out how they got broke in the first place to prevent that from happening again. Well that is part of my job with respect to the data that flows through our company, between our workers, our customers, our vendors, and to the government regulators.

You may have heard that in the real world, there's a lot of spam, viruses, hackers, malware out there. We have a computer network that is highly resistant to that stuff. Our workers almost never get spam. It is decades since the last time anyone at our company got a virus. This is not because we've been lucky, it is because we have been smart. We recognize that our business is mission critical.

For many other people in the world, mission critical is a concept that is not in their vocabulary. Your IT dept, that's me, wants our business to continue to be profitable, competitive, in perpetuity, and so long as I am able to do the work, I would love to still be working here when I am age 150, if that is legal and allowable, because this is a very interesting, intellectually stimulating job that you have me doing.