UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [471]
http://www.elsop.com/wrc/nospam.htm
27.3 SYSADMIN SURVEYS
In 1992, Rob Kolstad and Jeff Polk surveyed attendees at LISA (USENIX’s Large Installation System Administration conference, which denies that it’s only for large sites) to determine how much time they spent on sysadmin chores and what level of support was required to maintain a site. Since then, SAGE, the System Administrators’ Guild associated with the USENIX association, has performed several similar surveys, usually focusing on salary information. In 1999, SANS, the System Administration, Networking, and Security Institute, also did a salary survey. The results of these surveys are excerpted in the next sections.
SAGE salary survey
At the LISA conference in the late fall of 1999, SAGE administered a sysadmin salary profile survey. The full report is available from www.usenix.org/sage. SAGE members can download an Acrobat file by supplying their membership number and password; others must register and are then emailed the file. SAGE does not sell your address but might send you information about their conferences and publications. (Actually, you can opt out of their spam when you register.)
Here are some interesting data points from the 1999 results, which incorporated responses from 2,300 system administrators who attended the conference or filled out the survey form on the web. Most of the respondents were full-time sysadmins who considered system administration their primary line of work. About 80% were from the United States; the remainder were from 48 different countries.
• The median salary was over $60,000 in the United States. The 90th percentile of earnings was almost $90,000.
• Over 86% received raises in 1999, ranging from 8% for those staying in the same job to 23% for those changing jobs and employers.
• Over 70% of organizations cannot find enough sysadmins—the hunt is on.
• Bonuses are not yet common for sysadmins, nor is overtime pay.
• Salaried sysadmins work 47.04
hours per week, on average.
• The most common operating systems were (in order): Solaris, Windows NT, Linux, Windows 95 and 98, HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, IRIX, MacOS, True 64 UNIX, and FreeBSD.
• Administration of NT and BSD systems was correlated with lower salaries.
• Education does not correlate strongly with salary. A BS degree was only worth an additional $6K over a high school degree.
• Years of experience did correlate strongly with salary; the most common value was 5 years of experience.
• Over a third of the sysadmins had been at their current job less than a year.
• Over 80% of respondents expected to still be sysadmins in 5 years. This is a nice change; system administration used to be the bottom of the barrel job that you did while waiting to be promoted to software developer. But some folks like getting more context switches in a day than a developer gets in a year.
• Less than 13% of the sysadmins were women.
• Almost 50% of the sysadmins were between 25 and 35 years old, with less that 1% below 20 or above 55.
• The most bothersome and problematic parts of the sysadmin’s job were (in order of popularity): dealing with management, work load and hours, and office politics and bureaucracy.
When reviewing the survey form, most system administrators realized that they really did not know exactly how they spent their day. Most sites felt understaffed. It doesn’t take too many whiny users for an insufficient user-to-sysadmin ratio to become oppressive.
SANS salary survey
The SANS survey for 1999 was administered over the web; about 11,000 people participated. The respondents were categorized as system administrators, network administrators, security administrators, database administrators, security consultants, or security auditors.
Many of the questions matched those of the SAGE survey, but direct comparisons are difficult because of the wider range of participants. Another difficulty in direct comparison is that SAGE used median statistics and SANS used averages. The SANS data presented