Scientists Say COVID Changed the Way Sysadmins Work

upstart writes:

Scientists say COVID changed the way sysadmins work:

Researchers from Germany's Max-Planck-Institut fur Informatik have studied how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the way systems administrators work, and found the profession was negatively impacted.

Their findings are detailed in a paper titled "'I needed to solve their overwhelmness': How system administration work was affected by COVID-19".

The researchers spoke to 24 sysadmins hailing from 12 economies (eight European, two North American, plus India and Ghana) about "their day-to-day sysadmin work before, during, and after the lockdown was enforced to better understand how their work was impacted by the lockdown and the ways in which they managed this."

The researchers found that sysadmins face unique pressures in a crisis because it's their job to keep everyone else working - even as they have to adjust their own practices.

"The ability of sysadmins to adapt to a crisis then has a cascading effect on other workers' ability to adapt."

The study found sysadmins mostly just did whatever it took in the early days of lockdowns, before their organizations moved "from implicit to explicit coordination, and from informal to formal interactions."

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