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2 sysadmins for 2 servers? What are they going to do all day? Managing those two servers should probably be 5-10% of their job -- 2-4h per week for each of them

2 sysadmins for 2 servers? What are they going to do all day? Managing those two servers should probably be 5-10% of their job -- 2-4h per week for each of them seems plenty --, while doing 90-95% other stuff. Like a sibling comment said, "Servers run on electricity, not sysadmin powered hamster wheels." I'm our de facto sysadmin here (university lab) and I spend maybe an hour a week taking care of our ~dozen bare-metal servers.

ChrisCinelli 7y ago
Facebook with 400m users had just one DBAs if I remember correctly. I wonder if people ever runs the numbers.
- laumars 7y ago
  Have you got a citation for that claim because that figure seems a little hard to believe. In terms of your general point: it really depends on your business. In my last job there were 4 DBAs out of 12 total IT staff and they were constantly busy. In my current job there are no DBAs in a much larger team and yet no requirement to need one either. The two businesses produce vastly different products.
- HelloNurse 7y ago
  Millions of Facebook accounts are a pretty harmless size metric. DBA workload increases with the number of employees, which is proportional to support requests, accidents, changes, strange needs that need to be addressed, and so on. Buying and provisioning disks before space runs out is a small part of a DBA's job, and a modest constant-size task compared to predicting how fast space is running out.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  > Facebook with 400m users had just one DBAs if I remember correctly. You don’t remember correctly. There are multiple and to my knowledge there hasn’t been just one in at least the past ten years.
- rwultsch 7y ago
  I was on the DBA team there around that MAU. I had lots of company and support from SRO (aka jr DBA's) as well as other teams (provisioning, etc...).
jakobegger 7y ago
> What are they going to do all day? Be on-call. You need the sysadmins to be available to fix issues when they happen, even if the fixing itself takes little time. > ... university lab ... I developed a few web sites for universities, and they were hosted by the university. You really have to hope nothing breaks on Friday afternoon, or you have to wait until Monday morning to get it fixed...

ChrisCinelli 7y ago

Facebook with 400m users had just one DBAs if I remember correctly. I wonder if people ever runs the numbers.

laumars 7y ago
Have you got a citation for that claim because that figure seems a little hard to believe. In terms of your general point: it really depends on your business. In my last job there were 4 DBAs out of 12 total IT staff and they were constantly busy. In my current job there are no DBAs in a much larger team and yet no requirement to need one either. The two businesses produce vastly different products.
HelloNurse 7y ago
Millions of Facebook accounts are a pretty harmless size metric. DBA workload increases with the number of employees, which is proportional to support requests, accidents, changes, strange needs that need to be addressed, and so on. Buying and provisioning disks before space runs out is a small part of a DBA's job, and a modest constant-size task compared to predicting how fast space is running out.
jsjohnst 7y ago
> Facebook with 400m users had just one DBAs if I remember correctly. You don’t remember correctly. There are multiple and to my knowledge there hasn’t been just one in at least the past ten years.
rwultsch 7y ago
I was on the DBA team there around that MAU. I had lots of company and support from SRO (aka jr DBA's) as well as other teams (provisioning, etc...).

jakobegger 7y ago

> What are they going to do all day? Be on-call. You need the sysadmins to be available to fix issues when they happen, even if the fixing itself takes little time. > ... university lab ... I developed a few web sites for universities, and they were hosted by the university. You really have to hope nothing breaks on Friday afternoon, or you have to wait until Monday morning to get it fixed...