Kerpau!

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of sysadmins of varying experience levels lately and think I have it all figured out. Inexperienced sysadmins expect things to work. Experienced sysadmins expect things to not work. This fundamental mindset leads to vastly different behavior patterns among the two types. If a sysadmin expects a system to fail, s/he will be more likely to perform regular backups, design redundancy into solutions, read the manuals before deployment, test a solution before deployment, test a solution after deployment and so forth. The inexperienced sysadmin reads the marketing materials, believes every word that comes out of the salesperson’s mouth, doesn’t plan for failure.

So when the system ultimately fails, the experienced sysadmin has an entire array of options to choose from. Like backups, failovers and expertise gained from reading the manuals. The inexperienced sysadmin has to resort to trial and error fixes on a live system with no fundamental understanding of the technology. This usually make the issue worse and leaves them in their last resort scenario - bugging tech support. Not good if your job depends on it.