| Connect jimfhall
Minnesota
Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.
Authored Comments
At a previous job at a university, one of my sysadmins was the lazy sysadmin, and he was great!
He hated to do boring stuff, so whenever he was assigned something that he found boring, he'd write a script to automate it so he didn't have to do it anymore. He didn't mind doing the work; he just didn't want to spend his days doing dull things.
Once I realized that's what he was doing, I rotated him through several "boring" tasks (something cool, then something boring, etc.). Eventually, he automated most of our manual tasks. Most valuable employee ever. And yes, he got recognized with an award and whatever pay increase I could give with our higher ed budget.
If only all my sysadmins were as lazy as that guy was.
Slackware was my second Linux distro, after SLS. And when I got my first job, I convinced my boss to buy a CD of "Slackware Pro" and try it out on a spare PC.
That eventually became my workstation (I was otherwise a junior Unix sysadmin, but we didn't have a spare Sun or Apollo workstation for me). Later, I installed Slackware on another spare PC and set up our first YP server to manage systems.
Good times.