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Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by ddingus on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @01:36PM (#25660678)
It just occurred to me a sysadmin log would be very valuable:

Installed update X to prevent risk Y

Wrote script to advance process Z on input A

Etc...

Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by dsr_ on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:33PM (#25661266)
I ask my junior sysadmins / new hires to write a daily log for their first year or so.

What did you do today?

What do you need help with?

What went well?

What was frustrating?

What should we change or fix?

When we get together to talk about their day or their week, these logs are extremely useful. Sometimes they generate tickets, sometimes book or course recommendations, people to talk to, sometimes just conversations.

Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by ddingus on Thursday January 07, 2021 @12:25AM (#25667576)
Nice. Seems like you are doing the work needed to bring them into things right.

I had a good mentor when I was doing sysadmin. Not quite as formal as this, but the conversations were similar.

Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by justin_oaks on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:26PM (#25661202)
As a sysadmin, I actually keep a log, but I'm under no illusions that anyone will ever see it but me.

I used to track my tasks in Jira with the thought that maybe my boss would look at it and see what I was doing. Of course he wasn't looking at it so I stopped doing it.

My log is mostly for me to provide a list of achievements to my boss whenever there's a review, or if I'm questioned about what I spend my time on.

Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by ddingus on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @02:32PM (#25661261)
I did too. But I never did connect the value points to the admin activities.

If I sysadmin again, I am going to do that. "Why those trains ran on time."

Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by toyg on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @07:27PM (#25665106)
It would, but these logs can also feel like oppressive and meaningless bureaucracy. A lot of sysadmins are not even good at typing...

It’s one of those things that would probably be naturally suited to voice-activated systems (“Hey Siri, today I updated system X to avoid Y, and I wrote a script to improve process Z on input A” - 5 seconds to say, log saved in the right place, keywords like “updated” and “system X” recognised and formalized into some record, etc), if only such systems actually worked on any word beyond the most trivial (good luck with context-less mentions of pythons, rubies, native-american tribes who somehow serve pages of webs, androids in phones, etc etc).

Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by ddingus on Thursday January 07, 2021 @12:25AM (#25667578)
Honestly, that kind of tool would be useful to a lot of people.
Re:What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry by thyrsus on Thursday January 07, 2021 @02:01AM (#25668074)
The entries in our ansible git repository are supposed to be that log.