TITLE: Searching for a College Sysadmin AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: January 31, 2007 8:42 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In my last post, I commented on academic searches. One of the articles I linked to gives some pretty good advice to prospective faculty applying for positions at smaller schools. They aren't fallback positions; they are different kinds of positions altogether. In the spirit of that post, I thought I'd share some of my recent experiences with other kinds of academic search. This year, I am involved in a couple of high-profile searches on my campus, both of which matter very much to the faculty in my department. The first is for the chief sysadmin in the College of Natural Sciences, and the second is for the Assistant Vice President of information technology for the university. Both matter to us for the same reasons, though in different doses. In this post, I'll talk a bit about the sysadmin search. Being a medium-sized "teaching university", we do not maintain and manage most of the basic computational resources that we use on a day-to-day basis. In the early years, before the rest of the college and university were deeply into technology, we did. But as our needs grew, and as other departments came to need computer labs and e-mail and the web, the college took on more and more of the systems burden. These days, the college sysadmin team implements and supports the network and server infrastructure for the college, manages the general college labs that our students use, and supports CS faculty labs and computer equipment. Not having the research money to maintain all of our department resources, this has worked out well enough for the last decade or so, with only occasional control issues arising. (One current one involves our web server, which for the last few weeks has been rewriting URLs in such a way as to break my blog permalinks.) So, the college's lead sysadmin has a challenging job to do. There are a lot of technical tasks to do, plus managing student staff and providing user support. The diversity of issues that arise in the college is yet another challenge, ranging from a CS department, a math department, and industrial technology department, and the traditional natural sciences. In some ways, CS demands less personal support from the college, but we do have specific technical needs, sometimes outliers from the rest of the crowd, that we rely heavily on. I'm chairing the college sysadmin search. In the process, I've come to appreciate just how hard it is to find candidates with sufficient technical skills and experience, sufficient "people" skills to work with a diverse audience of users, and sufficient managerial experience. Add to that a salary that is almost certainly lower than market value in private industry, and the task is even tougher. Even with these challenges, we have a promising pool of finalists and hope to begin on-campus interviews soon. Here are some things that I've learned in the last few years and am trying to put into practice for this search:

Technical skills matter. Period. You can't hire a sysadmin with marginal or insufficient skills and hope that they can grow into the job. technology changes so fast that most such folks never have the chance to catch up. They just fall farther and farther behind. Strong Unix and Windows background; experience setting up and configuring servers; broad experience with software -- all are essential. Don't settle for less lightly.

Communication skills matter. A college-level sysadmin must be able to work with advanced and novice users alike, train students, and mentor full-time assistants. They also have to be able to explain technical choices and trends to department heads and deans, so that these administrators can make informed decisions about equipment and budgets. This latter is more important than many folks realize. Being a sysadmin at this level isn't just about hacking Ruby scripts to automate mechanical tasks; it also contains an element of helping others set vision.

But do not emphasize communication skills to the detriment of technical skills. Of course, you can't emphasize technical skills to the detriment of communication skills either, but at my university and in our current environment, favoring tech skills to the expense of communication skills just hasn't been a problem. Folks are more inclined to go with someone who has people skills and is agreeable, even if they lack the skills necessary to do the job well. Don't do it. You'll always pay in the long run.

On the search process itself: Fairness matters. Once you have published a job description, stick to it. It can be really tempting to say "I like this candidate's application..." and then start looking away from the ways in which the candidate falls short of the requirements and preferences that you had defined for the position at the outset of the search. This is a sure way to let your hidden biases get in the way of hiring the right candidate. The job description is your specification. If it is well thought out, you're almost certainly better off letting it guide the committee's actions.
But I think it's also wrong to skirt the job description for another reason: It's unfair to other candidates who were honest about not meeting the requirements of the position and so didn't apply at all. If you are willing to consider folks in your pool who do not meet the specs, then you might really want to consider some of those who self-selected out of the pool through a sense of honor. And then there is the practical problem of having to relax the requirements fairly for all of the applicants in the pool, not just the one who caught your attention for some other reason.

Maybe I'm too strict on this matter, but this sort of fairness is a sticky point for me. I try to manage my classroom similarly. If I feel a need to repeatedly relax a particular rule, then I probably need to change the rule, not relax it. Otherwise, exceptions tend to favor that certain group of students who are bold or needy enough to ask for exceptions, at the expense of the students who live by the rules quietly. (Can you guess which sort of student I most likely was?)

Leadership matters. Once a sysadmin can put ship into seaworthy condition and have things running as they should, it's awfully nice to have someone in place who can think bigger thoughts and help guide the department or college. This isn't crucial, as faculty and other administrators are already charged with this task, but why waste the expertise that your sysadmin brings to the table, especially if they are inclined to help lead? Allowing them to do so helps the college and lets the sysadmin grow professionally.

We'll see how successful the college is at finding the right sort of person, with what bit of influence I have been able to exert. -----