Let’s imagine, for a second, that you woke up this morning as a systems admin. You get out of bed, have breakfast and sit at your work desk. You turn on your computer, and you have a few requests pending;

• “Hi, thanks for your help so far. Please, can you help with the password reset again. I didn't make use of it the last time”.

• “Good morning sir, I have completed the setup, is there a need to allow the vpn connect?”

• “Hi Gabriel, thanks for the guide. Please, my VPN doesn't work without connecting to the internet”

• “Hello, my computer logged me out. It was requesting that I update my password but I wanted to do it later”

Wait.

Before you lose your wits and slam your fists on your desk, that’s just the start of the day. There’s a lot more where that came from. Being a system administrator is typically stereotyped as having to deal with a lot of “silly” requests. And it can sound like that. But at the heart of it is solving problems, and that’s why I started in this field in the first place.

To successfully take you through a day in the life of a systems administrator, you need a bit of context. My name is Gabriel, and I’m the lead systems administrator at Moniepoint. Depending on where you might have first heard the term, you might have varying ideas of what a system admin does. But I like to think of what I do as solving problem, or making sure they never happen in the first place. With that in mind, here’s what a typical day for me is like;

8:30 am

My day rarely starts typically, but one thing it always starts with is problems. We call them requests. By the time I log on, there’s likely a thing or two pending that I need to attend to. Someone who needs a password reset, or another person curious about a problem they’re having with their VPN. And it probably sounds a bit dreary, starting with problems, but that’s the exciting thing about being a system admin - the opportunity to help people on your team by solving their problems.

9:00 am

By 9:00 am, I have meetings with my team to discuss pending projects and things we need to do. During this meeting, we might highlight necessary updates that we need to make to our systems or new solutions that we can explore. 

As a team lead, meeting like this is important to stay in sync with my team and collaborate to solve pending issues.

Before Moniepoint, I worked as an IT support staff and found it limiting. I couldn’t solve problems myself and often had to escalate them. Often, I had ideas for how things could be improved or done differently, but these were outside the scope of my role, so they weren’t considered.

But things are different here. I joined Moniepoint in July 2021 after receiving an offer from the HR recruiter. It was exciting until I was told it would be an internship. That gave me mixed feelings - I was excited to try something more in line with what I wanted to do, but also a bit sceptical about taking an internship. After the internship, what next?

Throughout the interview process, I kept asking what would happen after the internship was over, and everyone told me the same thing - “it will depend on your performance”. Determined to give it my best, I decided to go for it.

10:30 am

After our morning meetings, I’m usually back to addressing more requests. I get requests from level one and two support teams, as well as HR, Operations and anyone else who might need my help. Think of my number as “911” for system emergencies.

I get a “Hi Gabriel, I need access to the core banking database on xxx server.”, and an, “How far Gabriel? We need to review everyone's permission on xxx”.

When I started as an intern, it took a minute for me to get used to it as I still had relatively limited access and had to collaborate to get things done. But soon, I noticed a difference here that made me decide that I wanted to be a part of this team - I was seen and heard.

My contributions counted.

When I brought up ideas and said, “Oh, why do we do it this way? Why not something else?” I often got the go-ahead to do a test run and compare my new solution with existing ones. Once I did it and got feedback, there was no judgement. If it worked, cool, we’d switch to the new solution. If it didn’t, it was also fine. I had validated what we were doing, and I could move on to the next thing. There was room for growth and for my ideas, and that made me want to stay.

One time, when I’d just joined as an intern, I had to set up about 300 laptops over a weekend. My first reaction? “It’s impossible”.

But I took a moment to look at it differently. The reason why it would be impossible was because we were using a manual method at that time. David wrote a script to handle this task, but it was still taking time to run. Then I had an idea to simplify it, and I tried it out. It worked, and in under 24 hours, I had finished what seemed like an impossible task.

My role began to evolve quickly. I started working with David five months after my internship started, and by the next month, he confirmed my employment.

We worked together for two more months, and then he introduced me to Devops. At this time, I was also handling our data centre and a few other things. With the transition to DevOps, I could perform my role as a system administrator on a whole new level.

11:00 am

Remember how I mentioned that some days go atypically? Well, this is usually around the time that it gets like that. If nothing happens, great. But on April 14th, 2023, something definitely happened.

I got a call from someone saying they couldn’t access the internet. At first, I assumed that it was a one-off and try to solve it as such, but I began getting more messages with the same complaint. When I checked Workplace, our internal communication platform, I realised everyone had the same problem.

Code red.

The interesting (and scary) thing about being a system administrator is that you often work in a live environment. My line manager, David, often says, “Don’t press spoil”, i.e. don’t break things. In a live environment, one thing going off could affect everyone.

If no one could access the internet, then nobody could work, and this could affect the company. I had to do something. To check what the problem was, I get on a call with my team. I checked my computer and the system logs, but neither was particularly helpful. I decided to get someone else’s laptop, and then I was finally able to identify the issue - the computer wass reporting back to its local host, so it could not access the internet.

We identified the issue, but there was no way to apply a solution to everyone because of the same problem - the laptops are offline.

11:30 am

With a bit of time past since this began, it became even more crucial that we fix it for everyone. Creating a fix for this meant accounting for most laptops being offline, and we needed to find a unique way to apply this solution. Wrote a few lines of code, modified, and modified it, and then sent it to David to crosscheck before we ran it. We finally found a way to run the command for everyone, and soon, we were all back online.

You know that scene after a hero saves the city, and everyone around them claps? That’s how I feel. It’s a great part of the experience for me at Moniepoint. I get to do things that move the needle. I can create solutions to problems and see those solutions deployed in real-time.

2:00 pm

Still on April 14th, as an analogy for an atypical day, everything was a bit settled by this time, but I still had a few people for whom the general solution didn’t work and I had to address them personally.

There are a lot of highlights in my career as a systems admin, but there are three key moments for me;

• Winning the MVP award at the Moniepoint end-of-year event last year

• Getting informed that I would be promoted to lead System Administrator (in under two years since I joined the company).

• Every moment when I get a “Thank you, Gabriel” after helping someone with a problem.

It’s one thing to get the opportunity to make key contributions to the company where you work, and it’s another to also  get recognised for these contributions. It’s truly exciting that I’ve been able to find both.

4:00 pm

By 4 pm, things have often gotten a lot more quiet. Most of the major issues are out of the way, and we’ve done our part to keep things up and active. Throughout the day, I collaborate across teams to ensure that everyone else can have a smooth working experience, tackling challenges as they come and working to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

No matter how chaotic it gets, I’m excited for the opportunity to solve problems. Each problem is an opportunity to try things differently and explore new creative solutions. I get to test out every idea I have and think of the best way to make contributions that count.

If you’re looking to join a team where your contributions count and you can solve problems, visit moniepoint.com/careers