I'm curious what other sysadmins spend their time on at their jobs. For example, how much of your time is spent on routine tasks and how much time is spent on projects? Also, what types of routine tasks do you do more than a couple times a week (account creation, reviewing log files, adding people to mailing lists, dealing with user problems, etc) and what otherwise manual tasks have you automated?

I'm just trying to get an idea of how other sysadmins spend their time on the job, particularly when it comes to routine tasks vs. projects.

Mostly Project Management. As for tasks I have scripted the backups, using rsync, and other than that the usual user creation.

The job I'm working now isn't a normal system administration job, but several of the previous jobs were. My typical duties included server maintenance, user/domain administration, backup verification, programming to automate tasks, optimization of existing scripts for a variety of purposes, light database and sql work, new server setups, setup of vpns and firewalls, design of new infrastructure and selection of hardware for new servers, and maintenance of just about everything on the network.

One of the most spectacular features of systems administration as a job role is the wide variety of things you can get into and learn. The other nice feature afforded is that you're generally lightly managed, you have a set of tasks you need to get done and as long as you do them reliably and well no one really bothers you except to occasionally add or remove something from your task sheet.

Most of the time at my previous jobs "routine tasks" took up 20-40% of my time and whatever projects I was currently working on took up a significant amount of the rest. What kind of infrastructure you have and how well maintained it has been definitely alters the amount of time it takes to perform the routine things too. I spent the first six months I was at one job just fixing all the things no one had done for over 5 years without breaking anything.

One of my best points as an administrator is that I'm an automation expert, I can automate virtually anything completely. Often at the front end of the job I spend a lot of time on routine maintenance and slowly transition to almost completely projects as I automate 95% of the maintenance items.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

I used to work as a system admin monitoring 3 Windows 2000 servers a couple of years back. To be honest - the repetitive tasks (monitoring logs, scheduling jobs, etc) was so damn boring - that I actually ended up writing a java utility to do all that.

Nett result - I got kicked out of that job as the utility started doing everything that I was hired to do!

There are a lot of differences from one "sysadmin" job to another. It depends on the organization, how many other tech positions there are, etc. Years ago I was the lone sysadmin for a software company. The programmers were the thoroughbreds, and I was the stable boy. I designed, built and maintained the network, the backups, the customer and sales database, and so on. Kept annoyances out of their way so that they could build the coolest software ever and generate millions of dollars in sales.

Later I ended up in an environment where I just took care of the Sun servers, several other people handled desktop support, and someone else handled the network. Now I share sysadmin responsibilities of the servers with another more senior sysadmin. I'm lucky enough to get assigned to develop and build new systems. That includes building complex mail systems, SAMP systems (Solaris rather than Linux), Drupal, gene sequencing engines, file sharing and backup systems, security lockdown, etc. I still provide backup support, reading logs, troubleshooting user issues, and so on. I get to play with new hardware when we can afford it. Right now I have a few new Sun T5220's with the Chip Multi-Threaded, multi-core T2 (one chip looks like 64 cpu's plus 8 fpu's plus 8 crypto accelerators plus 2 10GigE interfaces plus memory cache for all that). I'm working with gccfss to build optimized applications. Lots of things get automated. I don't have to think about backups very often, because Amanda and my tape library take care of those. The senior sysadmin has perl scripts that take downloads of course listings and generate hundreds of student accounts automatically. Those are now getting populated into LDAP with Samba, Unix, and MacOSX logins connecting to LDAP with TLS.

Basically, what you do depends on a lot of things including the size and setup of your organization and how many other techies there are. I expect that you would get a lot of different answers from different sysadmins. If you were looking for a job, look at it carefully and ask them as many questions as they ask you. Last time I was job hunting, I don't think I saw any two that were alike. As a sysadmin, you have to be adaptable and constantly learning.

I read the NYTimes, watch stocks, and listen to death metal on my iPod.

I'm just kidding. 10% of the time I am solving computer problems at someone's desk, researching an AutoCAD feature, or retrieving a backup. The rest of the time I create things to work on, often creating/improving the automated systems.

Confidence and experience is the important part.