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We've been in business for about 8 years and use about ~100 sysadmin hours a year. I interviewed several sysadmins over the years and no one that I deemed comp

We've been in business for about 8 years and use about ~100 sysadmin hours a year. I interviewed several sysadmins over the years and no one that I deemed competent charged less than $100/hour. I did find people charging as low as $50/hour but they didn't seem that great, or that reliable, or that available. For me as well, you pretty much need to trust your sysadmin more than almost anyone else in your company (except people that can sign checks). Trust comes at a premium. I will yield that I don't like working with substandard people. I hate having to manage people and am willing to pay a premium for people I trust to work on the right things with the right skills in a timely manner. Besides, it doesn't scale. One of my business goals is to never have middle management.

tptacek 15y ago
You'd be more convincing if you didn't imply that anyone who worked for less than $100/hr was "substandard". For full-time salaried, I assure you, $200k/yr is not the going rate for sysadmin.
- nestlequ1k 15y ago
  You cant directly equate contract hourly rate with yearly salary. If you don't have the budget to hire a 100k a yr salary, you'll have to pay contract rates which could be over 100/hr
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I buy that the valley is so hot right now that a sysadmin commands $100k/yr there, but they don't in Chicago, Seattle, or New York. I'm not looking to argue so much as to inject some more data into the price point that was casually dropped on this thread earlier. I do not think the other guy overpaid for sysadmin; if he's got an amazing admin, great! I can see paying a premium for that. Another point I'd like to raise is, if you're paying $100k/hr for sysadmin, and using them frequently, contracting instead of fulltiming sysadmin might be penny-wise-pound-foolish. But maybe not, if you're only paying $10,000/yr in sysadmin. We've used over 100 hours of admin in just the last couple weeks. A great hire; one we made "37signals-style", after realizing that doing all the sysadmin chores ourselves was subtly making us all miserable and ineffective. Believe me, I know the difference between contracting rates and salary. ;)
- illumin8 15y ago
  He is absolutely correct. A senior Linux admin is going to charge $75 an hour, and the contracting company that finds them will charge $25 an hour for handling the paperwork. You could hire someone full time for about $120K a year but then with benefits and employer taxes it will end up being closer to $150K a year anyway.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    $120k is nosebleed high for full-time sysadmin. Are you sure we're talking about "system administrator" and not a more specialized role like "devops"? I know to us nerds those are basically the same thing, but they really aren't. If you're doing sysadmin for the primary purpose of deploying and maintaining boxes designed to run one proprietary application, you might be a devops person, and not a sysadmin. Again, this might be a valley thing. I've got a bunch of friends who have complained how hard it is to get sysadmin in SFBA. Just know, if that's the case, the dropoff in salary outside the valley is waaaaaaaaaay sharper than it is for dev, which is pretty much just COLA adjusted from place to place. (We staff offices in Manhattan, Chicago, and Mountain View, for what it's worth).
    - apinstein 15y ago
      For my part, I suppose I was talking devops, or at least a sysadmin that thinks devops is a good idea and can help make it happen. It's probably wrong from a larger perspective to lump the two together, but for me sysadmin as a role has been supplanted with devops. If you are a sysadmin that doesn't want to automate away their work via devops, you are not doing it right.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        I agree that as a career choice, "system administrator" seems less lucrative than "devops". Remember, though, that not every sysadmin job is for an agile software shop. There are plenty of places that care a lot more about patch cycles than they do about single-click deployments. More importantly though, bill rates and capability do not track each other. Bill rates track risk. There is a lot of amazing- but- unproven systems talent out there, and there are some very expensive pikers on the market too. Generally I would agree that the more you pay, the less likely you are to have to fire 3 months later. It helps a lot to be able to do the job yourself, soup-to-nuts, so that you'll have a better shot at screening candidates.
- apinstein 15y ago
  I don't think I implied that. I said only that I interviewed a handful of people and of that sample set, the people that charged less than $100/hour were not competent. They suffered from things like only knowing one flavor of UNIX, or having never heard of chef/puppet/etc, or not really knowing shell scripting, or not having heard of security stuff that even I know about. I am not an experienced sysadmin, but when I feel like I could do a better job than the person I'm interviewing, I consider that substandard.

tptacek 15y ago

You'd be more convincing if you didn't imply that anyone who worked for less than $100/hr was "substandard". For full-time salaried, I assure you, $200k/yr is not the going rate for sysadmin.

nestlequ1k 15y ago
You cant directly equate contract hourly rate with yearly salary. If you don't have the budget to hire a 100k a yr salary, you'll have to pay contract rates which could be over 100/hr
- tptacek 15y ago
  I buy that the valley is so hot right now that a sysadmin commands $100k/yr there, but they don't in Chicago, Seattle, or New York. I'm not looking to argue so much as to inject some more data into the price point that was casually dropped on this thread earlier. I do not think the other guy overpaid for sysadmin; if he's got an amazing admin, great! I can see paying a premium for that. Another point I'd like to raise is, if you're paying $100k/hr for sysadmin, and using them frequently, contracting instead of fulltiming sysadmin might be penny-wise-pound-foolish. But maybe not, if you're only paying $10,000/yr in sysadmin. We've used over 100 hours of admin in just the last couple weeks. A great hire; one we made "37signals-style", after realizing that doing all the sysadmin chores ourselves was subtly making us all miserable and ineffective. Believe me, I know the difference between contracting rates and salary. ;)
illumin8 15y ago
He is absolutely correct. A senior Linux admin is going to charge $75 an hour, and the contracting company that finds them will charge $25 an hour for handling the paperwork. You could hire someone full time for about $120K a year but then with benefits and employer taxes it will end up being closer to $150K a year anyway.
- tptacek 15y ago
  $120k is nosebleed high for full-time sysadmin. Are you sure we're talking about "system administrator" and not a more specialized role like "devops"? I know to us nerds those are basically the same thing, but they really aren't. If you're doing sysadmin for the primary purpose of deploying and maintaining boxes designed to run one proprietary application, you might be a devops person, and not a sysadmin. Again, this might be a valley thing. I've got a bunch of friends who have complained how hard it is to get sysadmin in SFBA. Just know, if that's the case, the dropoff in salary outside the valley is waaaaaaaaaay sharper than it is for dev, which is pretty much just COLA adjusted from place to place. (We staff offices in Manhattan, Chicago, and Mountain View, for what it's worth).
  - apinstein 15y ago
    For my part, I suppose I was talking devops, or at least a sysadmin that thinks devops is a good idea and can help make it happen. It's probably wrong from a larger perspective to lump the two together, but for me sysadmin as a role has been supplanted with devops. If you are a sysadmin that doesn't want to automate away their work via devops, you are not doing it right.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      I agree that as a career choice, "system administrator" seems less lucrative than "devops". Remember, though, that not every sysadmin job is for an agile software shop. There are plenty of places that care a lot more about patch cycles than they do about single-click deployments. More importantly though, bill rates and capability do not track each other. Bill rates track risk. There is a lot of amazing- but- unproven systems talent out there, and there are some very expensive pikers on the market too. Generally I would agree that the more you pay, the less likely you are to have to fire 3 months later. It helps a lot to be able to do the job yourself, soup-to-nuts, so that you'll have a better shot at screening candidates.
apinstein 15y ago
I don't think I implied that. I said only that I interviewed a handful of people and of that sample set, the people that charged less than $100/hour were not competent. They suffered from things like only knowing one flavor of UNIX, or having never heard of chef/puppet/etc, or not really knowing shell scripting, or not having heard of security stuff that even I know about. I am not an experienced sysadmin, but when I feel like I could do a better job than the person I'm interviewing, I consider that substandard.