In the eighties, all engineering students at my university had access to an IBM 3090 mainframe. There were some CS kids who were way better than the admins at e

In the eighties, all engineering students at my university had access to an IBM 3090 mainframe. There were some CS kids who were way better than the admins at exploiting the system. (I don't remember the details, but the student newspaper once wrote about an exploit that required a coordinated attack with the mainframe of a different university.) The admins were smart enough to befriend those kids and let them help manage the system. Better to have them to your side than to have them as an adversary.