/var/log/manager: A Generational Theory of Sysadmins

System administrators start from someplace. They’re born to it, they’re trained for it, or maybe they just fall into it. Regardless of the origin story, each sysadmin brings a certain something, a fire in the belly, an approach that is creative and inquisitive, and a motivation that is oddly tough to pin down. Over the past few years of hiring technical staff, I started getting a feeling that the type of sysadmin I was used to finding just wasn’t as common any more. I felt like something was changing in the work force, which led me to develop my own “theory” of generations of sysadmins and ultimately to change how I approach hiring and managing sysadmins who don’t fit into just one model...