I'm sorry you've had such an awful experience with sysadmin colleagues that you've developed such a corrosive attitude towards them. I've worked in lots of good environments, where dev/ops was being effectively practiced, and sysadmins there were the most effective force multipliers imaginable.
This is going to be a sensitive topic, but can we talk about ""BOFH"" culture somewhere on this thread? (Maybe I'm old and it's now dead, but I think some of it persists)
I kind of understand it as a product of working in an environment where everything is urgent and nothing is appreciated, but when sysadmins come to resent the people they're supposed to be supporting then the force multiplier turns negative. Sysadmins develop strategies for reducing the number of requests at any cost, usually by making the experience as opaque and unhelpful as possible.
in such an environment i wouldn't expect any other result. fix the environment, not the rational human response to it.
The BOfH is the archetype of someone who is excellent both with technology and politics. When you are in a service role, you have two competing priorities. You must deliver people the things they want, but also keep things nice and stable for yourself so you don't go crazy.
An important dynamic in organizations is laziness vs. intimidation. Political savviness allows you to apply intimidation to get the lazy to do what you want. You can threaten to fire, or raise an issue that could possibly get them fired and even if it doesn't, won't make you look good. The BOfH is someone who can respond to political intimidation with adroit technical interventions to ensure that his second priority, ensuring a smoothly-running system, isn't threatened.
If you read the BOfH stories carefully, you see that the operator knows where his bread is buttered and is careful to remain on good terms with the people who really have the power in the company. The whole thing is a phenomenal read on organizational dynamics.
This is sometimes an organizational problem. I worked in a support role at VMware for about 5 years and this is what I observed:
- Support & IT departments typically have enough staff in the beginning
- The organization grows & the department grows to match the new work that exists
- At a certain point, the organizational view of Support & IT/Ops changes, and it's now viewed as a cost that you want to keep down.
- Leaders try to minimize the increases in budget, but the workload per sysadmin/engineer increases.
- The sysadmins/engineers have no control over the flow of new work, which effects the quality of work that gets done and can create a toxic environment.
It literally becomes impossible to handle all the incoming requests. Different people handle it differently. Good sysadmins would learn to prioritize properly, but due to the toxicity some people have trouble handling it so they end up developing strategies to make a certain number of requests "go away".
Anyway- just my two cents.
1) Leadership: Stop viewing the IT/Ops/Support department as a "cost to keep down".
2) Leadership: Treat the department like they are manned by people.
3) Realize that not all requests are created equal. Some take minutes, some take months.
4) Determine a reasonable number of requests/tickets per sysadmin/engineer. Make sure to add padding for things like project work, sick time, vacation, professional development, and so on.
5) Hire proactively to prevent the determined threshold above from being surpassed.
6) From the IT/Ops departments perspective: realize that the incoming requests are coming from people that need your help and they are effectively your clients/customers. Treat them as if customer satisfaction is extremely important!
There are also other strategies where you give a subset of people the ability to work on projects and designate a different subset to be interupted with urgent requests, and rotate the role. There are all kinds of things you can do to improve the situation :)