-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 7/15/10 04:15 , Luke S Crawford wrote: > You need to make it clear that there is no longer a script, and that > their job is now, essentially, to figure things out.
+1 When I first got a job involving larger projects (with more severe consequences for f***ups), my immediate reaction was to build test environments for those projects so I could familiarize myself with them *before* (a) I had to make major changes (b) I had to pull someone's nuts out of the fire. This had several useful knock-on effects beyond just gaining experience: in one case, I recognized a senior coworker was making a mistake before the fact (sadly my warning wasn't heeded) --- but also, my testbed turned out to allow me to fix the resulting outage much faster than would otherwise have been possible. Interesting learning experience for both of us, as it turned out. Key part of this: no constraints on exploration of the test environment, only guidelines to help the fledgling find his/her feet. You don't just learn the ropes of the environment you're mirroring; you also get to exercise your mental muscles for "figuring things out". This is invaluable when you suddenly get hit with a production outage and no clue what's going on, because now you have the skills to find the cause. (As a mentor, it can also help to occasionally throw deliberate "failures" into the testbed for the mentee to find and fix.) - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkw/NdAACgkQIn7hlCsL25UPPgCeIxX6KKoVnsyMRaNH6vhcMDqf fIMAn1mYIHuoC4FE55k7ka1l3rvdanYk =7QTy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
