[Reader-list] TECHSPLOITATION: Network Admin Blues

[Harsh Kapoor]

Alternet.org

TECHSPLOITATION: Network Admin Blues
Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
November 20, 2001

It all started years ago, like so many things in Brian's life, in the 
permacloud of pot smoke that hung over the dorm room he shared with 
Jeff for nine memorable months in college. Sophomore year they were 
enjoying the delights of a new ceramic bong molded in the shape of 
Bart Simpson's head and talking about Jeff's new love: Linux. It was 
this kickass operating system kind of like UNIX, he told Brian. Jeff 
pointed to a stack of roughly a hundred floppies sitting on his desk. 
"There it is," he beamed. "Linux."

Brian was still halfway undeclared and halfway applying to get into 
the College of Engineering. All he knew was he wanted to break 
things, take them apart, put them together again. When Brian was 
seven, he'd played around with the wiring in a cable box near his 
house until he figured out how to get free HBO in his room. That was 
what floated vaguely in his mind when he imagined his future: endless 
days of experimentation that would result in slightly illegal -- but 
inarguably pleasurable -- results.

So the Linux thing was intriguing, especially when Jeff started 
talking about how a whole bunch of engineers were pounding on it and 
adding to it all the time.

"OK, so show me what this damn thing does," Brian challenged, 
launching himself at Jeff's desk in a burst of ill-coordinated 
enthusiasm. He barely understood how a file system worked, and when 
Jeff started talking about compiling kernels, he definitely found 
himself in "bullshit and feign knowledge" territory.

Gradually he became fascinated. Jeff walked him through the file tree 
and the basic tools, and suddenly Brian could picture a whole, vast 
network of machines, running this operating system or some other 
UNIX-like setup, working together at his root-privileged commands. It 
felt like ... free cable.

And so Brian became a computer science major. He learned to program 
in C and build a motherboard, but he never strayed far from his 
original passion: networks. He graduated about the time the whole 
dot-com bubble was swelling, but he wasn't drawn to any of the 
strange little startups with names like FireFrog and SphinxPop. He 
dated a chick who worked for one called All Natural, and it sounded 
like all they ever did was take ecstasy and sling HTML. Plus, their 
network sucked ass. When he visited his girlfriend once at All 
Natural, he actually overheard the CEO telling their senior network 
guy that he wanted all the wires to be color coordinated to match the 
company logo. Color coordinated!

For the past five years he'd been working his way to the top of a 
hardcore team of network engineers at one of the gigantic 
corporations in Silicon Valley. It was a beautiful network, highly 
organized, whose servers ran Solaris and SuSE Linux and OpenBSD. Jeff 
had gotten a job with him last year, doing security, and they had 
long, late-night sessions where they assaulted the network, looking 
for security holes and imagining the ultimate BSD toolbox.

Then things started changing. He and Jeff's requests for a new server 
were turned down, and they were told to "make do with what you have." 
As various network admins quit, they weren't replaced; he and Jeff 
were required to do things like help the managers with their e-mail 
programs. Brian felt less like a devious mastermind and more like a 
plumber everyday.

He noticed a subtle change in personnel, too. More and more of his 
team was female, a situation that would have seemed impossible two 
years ago. The women did just fine -- it wasn't like they were 
stupider than the guys had been -- but he knew for a fact that they 
weren't getting paid nearly as much. He remembered his '70s-feminist 
mom telling him that women were always over-represented in low-paying 
professional jobs. The pink-collar ghetto, she called it. Was he 
stuck in the pink-collar ghetto? "I wouldn't be surprised if the VPs 
asked us to fix the coffeemaker and serve them lattes next," Brian 
griped to Jeff, who was looking for job leads online.

The glamour had gone out of being a network admin. He was doing 
maintenance, keeping the old machines chugging along, making sure the 
VPs could run PowerPoint presentations and open Excel spreadsheets 
remotely. That free-cable feeling had died. At the USENIX conference 
for network geeks, it seemed like everyone except the exceptional 
celebrity geeks were in the same boat. They felt like digital 
janitors.

For the first time in his life Brian wondered what it was like to 
form a union, back in the 1930s when things were really hardcore. 
Then he turned back to his monitor, where he was reading an article 
from LinuxToday.com, and imagined starting a new open source project. 
He would call it Janitor.


Annalee Newitz (janitor at techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd 
with a chip on her shoulder. Her column also appears in Metro, 
Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper. 
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