IT Generalist and System Admin Titles for the SMB
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I believe his concern is that he feels "14 servers" isn't enough to qualify as a System Administrator. That or it's simply not complex enough.
A flat network, 14 servers (mostly virtualized) with a couple of DC's webservers, RDP servers etc
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huh, if that's the case, then I guess I'm in his same boat. I have two VM hosts and three, soon to be zero bare metal servers.
Sure I'm not dedicated to one thing, say CRM or Exchange or WebDev, but then again I don't really want to be. Would I like to play with a few more of the toys the big boys have, sure, but do I want to just sit at my desk all day pounding on a keyboard - not really, besides my waistline is large enough as it is..
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@Dashrender said:
huh, if that's the case, then I guess I'm in his same boat. I have two VM hosts and three, soon to be zero bare metal servers.
You are a Generalist, as are essentially all people in the SMB. True System Admins don't actually exist in the SMB market and the term is just thrown around. Actual system admins look nothing like what SMB roles look like.
Easy test: have you ever seen one of your servers in person? Good chance you aren't a full time SA
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
huh, if that's the case, then I guess I'm in his same boat. I have two VM hosts and three, soon to be zero bare metal servers.
You are a Generalist, as are essentially all people in the SMB. True System Admins don't actually exist in the SMB market and the term is just thrown around. Actual system admins look nothing like what SMB roles look like.
Easy test: have you ever seen one of your servers in person? Good chance you aren't a full time SA
LOL. Very true. But putting IT generalist on a Resume would probably often get it rejected. If that's not true, I would need a litany of IT hiring managers from well known companies providing resumes that they've hired to show me different.
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@Dashrender said:
LOL. Very true. But putting IT generalist on a Resume would probably often get it rejected.
That depends on the quality of job that you seek. If your goal is to get into a real system admin role and hope that you can do so by bluffing, than using the wrong title would help if you can bluff well.
If your goal is to get into a good SMB Generalist role, a good hiring manager would avoid someone who was truly a system admin in most cases as they would lack the needed skills for the job and would be very suspicious that you were faking the title as well.
If your goal is to be hired by someone who is not aware of the titles or is okay with someone pretending to be something that they are not, then yes, having that title on a resume might help.
It's not a good or bad, it's about who you want to considering hiring you.
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@Dashrender said:
If that's not true, I would need a litany of IT hiring managers from well known companies providing resumes that they've hired to show me different.
The "average" in any field is bad. The average hiring manager is not competent. The average work environment is not good.
If the goal is average or below, then yes, bluffing, playing to ego or just leveraging incompetence is certainly the way to go. If the goal is to work for great environments, teams and managers, they are not.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
A lot of these problems would be solved if only the world started excepting "IT Generalist" as a valid job title.
Quoting the other thread to bring over the content post fork.
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@Jason said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Easy test: have you ever seen one of your servers in person? Good chance you aren't a full time SA
True we have people for that they rack them and replace HW. I have seen mine but it's rare. Same thing for the Datacenter UPS and HVAC we have people for that.
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@Dashrender said:
In the SMB environment most hiring managers don't know the difference between IT Generalist and IT Admin. I'd be willing to bet the assumption would be
IT Generalist = someone who can support desktops
IT Admin = someone who can support serversIn the enterprise, sure they might, would probably know the difference, but SMB? you really think they do?
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@Dashrender said:
In the enterprise, sure they might, would probably know the difference, but SMB? you really think they do?
In a good SMB, absolutely. One that takes IT seriously would have to. How can you take anything seriously and not even know the job you are trying to hire?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
In the enterprise, sure they might, would probably know the difference, but SMB? you really think they do?
In a good SMB, absolutely. One that takes IT seriously would have to. How can you take anything seriously and not even know the job you are trying to hire?
Can you take most SMBs (government included) seriously at all? My experience was no.
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I have so little job hunting experience that have no idea how many Good/Great SMB employers there are that truly understand the value of IT to their business and value it as they should.
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@Dashrender said:
IT Generalist = someone who can support desktops
IT Admin = someone who can support serversNo, that's incorrect.
IT Generalist: Someone who supports "everything." The IT Jack of All Trades. The Archmage of IT. Sure desktops would be assumed, but servers too without question as well as networking, security, application support, hypervisors and other functions. Don't confuse a generalist with a desktop tech. SMBs do sometimes hire dedicated desktop support specialists because SMBs can have enough users and/or desktops to support that specialist role. Helpdesk as well. But not system admin. Generalists are what most SMBs hire, at least one of. Someone who can do "everything needed in the environment." Called LAN Admins in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
IT Admin: Not a real term.
System Admin: Someone who supports systems (not servers.) Systems refers to the OS. So a system admin would support Windows, RHEL, CentOS, Suse, Ubuntu, OpenVMS or similar. One or more operating system platforms. Not servers as a term, that implies the physical server or even the virtualization platform. A system admin would not generally touch either of these.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
IT Generalist = someone who can support desktops
IT Admin = someone who can support serversNo, that's incorrect.
IT Generalist: Someone who supports "everything." The IT Jack of All Trades. The Archmage of IT. Sure desktops would be assumed, but servers too without question as well as networking, security, application support, hypervisors and other functions. Don't confuse a generalist with a desktop tech. SMBs do sometimes hire dedicated desktop support specialists because SMBs can have enough users and/or desktops to support that specialist role. Helpdesk as well. But not system admin. Generalists are what most SMBs hire, at least one of. Someone who can do "everything needed in the environment." Called LAN Admins in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
IT Admin: Not a real term.
System Admin: Someone who supports systems (not servers.) Systems refers to the OS. So a system admin would support Windows, RHEL, CentOS, Suse, Ubuntu, OpenVMS or similar. One or more operating system platforms. Not servers as a term, that implies the physical server or even the virtualization platform. A system admin would not generally touch either of these.
you quoted me out of context!
Of course I've come to accept those terms as you've defined them for us here and at SW, but I was specifically referring to what SMB hiring managers probably think when they see those terms.
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The one role that is common (but not TOO common) to mix with system admin is virtualization platform admin and/or cloud admin. I've never seen a company larger than 1,000 people mix these two together, but I know that it happens sometimes. But because of standard focus and separation of duty concerns, these two generally remain independent.
Typically a system admin would be supported either higher or lower in the "stack" by roles like server tech (sometimes called a datacenter tech) and platform engineer (virtualization) on the "lower" side and application specialists (Exchange, Hadoop, whatever) and database admins on the higher side.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The one role that is common (but not TOO common) to mix with system admin is virtualization platform admin.
We didn't used to but a while back the CIO decided to merge it. We are considering the virtulization a comity item now. Storage is still separate.
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@scottalanmiller said:
side and application specialists (Exchange, Hadoop, whatever) and database admins on the higher side.
I'd love to clean house our exchange team though. Ours goes down for for 10min or so at least once a month.
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@Dashrender said:
Of course I've come to accept those terms as you've defined them for us here and at SW, but I was specifically referring to what SMB hiring managers probably think when they see those terms.
I see, I don't feel that any non-IT person uses "IT Admin." I've never once heard that used by a business doing hiring. Are you really seeing that places?
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@Jason said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The one role that is common (but not TOO common) to mix with system admin is virtualization platform admin.
We didn't used to but a while back the CIO decided to merge it. We are considering the virtulization a comity item now. Storage is still separate.
With more and more businesses dropping VMware and being able to have UNIX Admins handle the cloud because it runs on KVM or Xen it makes more and more sense. With VMware the cloud platform was completely unique, with Xen it is more an extension of the tasks already being done.
