Getting Fired for Being Proactive

April 10th, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio

I recently had an interesting conversation, via blog comments, with a network administrator who insisted that if he keeps the network up and running 100% of the time, he loses his job.

His rationale went like this, when the network is up all the time for a couple of years someone inevitably looks and decides that a well paid network administrator just isn’t needed because the network is so stable. On the other hand if instead he just lets the network run and then scrambles to fix it when it is broken, his job is safe, because he gets to come to the rescue. Are there really places like this?

For the customers that I deal with if the network isn’t up 99.99% of the time, network administrators get fired, not the other way around. I’d love to hear some feedback on this, are network administrators really better off letting the network fail so that they can be heroes?

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April 10th, 2008

1 Comment Add your own

1. Jeff | April 10th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

I can’t speak to places, but I have clients like this. I am a co-owner of a managed web hosting provider who prides ourselves on 99.999% uptime. On more than one occasion we have been left because the servers seemed to not have any problems.

The obvious solution here is to keep them well informed about what we do on a daily basis, but generally people just want the Ronco rotisserie solution. (just set it and forget it)

That in conjunction with the fact that decision makers are often not well versed in these areas (isn’t that why the hired us?) making it a very fine line to walk on educating them about your value.

I wold love to hear some ideas on the subject.

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