Saturday, April 10, 2010

Good Problems

Most of my posts have something to do with complaining about different products and the ridiculous bugs they have, and anyway who loves problems? Every sysadmin would like to come to the office in the morning drink his cup of coffee (or tea, in my case) and go spend the rest of the day at the beach knowing everything will work perfectly and his presence won't be needed.
But problems, as strange as it sounds, have an upside as well.

First of all, if things were so simple, people like me would be unemployed. We'd still be able to go to the beach, but we wouldn't be getting paid for it. But even without fantasizing about a prefect world, problems are important. Might sound like I'm a bit exaggerating, but I really think problems make you a better sysadmin.
Come to think about it, problems to a sysadmin are like fights to a relationship, no one really wakes up in the morning and thinks to himself "Oh, I'd like a good argument today", but couples do fight and resolving those arguments usually strengthens the bond (and like with systems too much fighting is probably a bad sign). And like those arguments, each problem you tackle makes you understand your system a bit better, understanding that is hard to achieve when everything just works.
The ERP system I used to administer is a great example. ERPs tend to be complex systems and ours not different, we have many utility scripts that accompany the system. Sure, I knew there were some scripts responsible for printing, but until I encountered some problems with them I didn't really get to understand each and single line of code in those scripts. And on the other hand, I wrote some scripts for an interface a few years ago, and those scripts work almost perfectly (I'm not necessarily objective here) up until now, so I'm pretty sure my replacement doesn't really know what's going on inside.

So maybe I should start giving more respect and appreciation to the problems I encounter (and complain less).