[ben509]

I've seen this sentiment quite a bit; it's an oddly romantic view of systems administration.

Most of the time you're hunting through documentation to find the correct settings. It's nothing new in general, it's not some kind of exciting math that's new to you, and you're rarely actually learning how the thing works. It's mostly trying a series of things until you figure out that some strings go in a place.

I appreciate it more when I'm writing software, but largely because I can actually invest the time to really solve the problem, that it fucking stays fixed, and that people will get back hours of their life that would otherwise be spent getting frustrated and searching aimlessly.