sysadmin++

So it looks like I am headed to the SysAdmin role. I had a talk with our CEO today and he’s all for the idea, which is good because I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it. Ideally it should be the new CTO’s decision but he started just a few weeks ago and Chris is the man with the magic stick and in the end if he doesn’t want to pull the trigger, no boom. There will be a whole list of items for me to learn and a few things that I think need to be straightened out a bit. Being a person freshly stepping into the role will help get some of the things done that we couldn’t push through before. I believe after you do the same job for awhile and fulfill that role, people tend to blow you off. Ideally this shuffle will change that and when we talk about needing things to insure the business runs it will be taken to heart rather then looking like petulant children groaning. It’s possible some of this will change with the fact that we have a CTO looking out for the interests of technology now, we’ll have to see. Being the only person in a position is not something I really advocate and eventually we will need to have two SysAdmins or at least another programmer/techie with interest in SysAdmin work. Absolute power corrupts and while I will strive to be the benevolent dictator, at some point the company will need someone looking over my shoulder to help make decisions. When you are the only one calling the shots it is always “my way”, from experience this has worked out decently well but in general things run much better when there is some sort of meeting of the minds.

Kate has asked me if this was a step up and I’m not really sure that it is, it’s probably more of a lateral move and in another company stepping into SysAdmin from being the DBA would most likely be a downward move. In our company though the small business aspect of it makes the roles really blurry, each of us covers much more then what our job title or job description includes. What this move will do is put a lot of responsibility squarely on my shoulders and if I screw it up then I will be directly accountable. If it all works I may get kudos or I may get nothing, much of that rides on how the new CTO works out and where the company finds itself within the next year. In any scenario it will put me in a much larger arena of decision making that directly effects the company, which is something I’ve been looking for. In the past I’ve had many issues with where things are going and how things are happening, but there are indicators now that a new breeze is about to blow and in my fresh schooner I’ll have to evaluate whether I’ll be tacking into the wind or catching a gale that leads to the new world.