Re: [PLUG] help with filling a sysadmin position

> You mention 24x7 support, FreeBSD, MTA and DB performance tuning,
interacting with clients, AND programing. That makes me wonder if the
new person would be part of an IT team and what size is the team,
because doing all of that or even some of all of that seems like it
could easily snowball into waaay too much work for just one person.

Those are things that are mentioned in the actual interview, not in the
ad ...

> what percent of the company is IT and what is other depts.

Never saw that type of info in an ad for any kind of position, much less
an IT one.

Yeah, but if you do everything the way the average business does, does that include going out of business within 5 years?

I have seen things that would indicate a company is almost all tech people, like an ad for a web 2.0 startup company and I have also seen things like 'Come work for the #1 turnip grower in N. America!', which would indicate mostly non-tech positions. I didn't mean it had to be exact stats, just something to get more of a feel for the type of job.
'Serious programing' is vague, too. Why is it serious? Is the stuff you normally do at work not serious? Is the programing maintaining a mission-critical app, or is it creating new software for new things your company is doing?
You don't have to be more specific, but after a very short while all the job postings start to look the same, at least to me.
It's like I'm reading through a cookbook - one list after another of buzz-words, 1/2 related to personality and 1/2 to 'technologies'. More detail really goes a long way in my book, and the things I've mentioned would require changing one or two sentences and adding 1 or 2.
I also see ads saying stuff to the effect of 'tell us why you want this job, not just any job', which is probably what most employers would prefer you tell them, but that never seems easy to me when the job posting reads like a Calculus cheat-sheet.
I'd still give the original ad an A, though - I don't at all mean it was anywhere near as bad as a lot of the ones I have seen. :)
-Josh