Difference between "operator" and "system administrator"?

[Russell J Fulton;ccc032u]

jessea at dynasys.UUCP (Jesse W. Asher) writes:


>A local company is going unix in a big way and one of the MIS Dept. 
>managers posed a question I was unable to answer.  They have AS400's and
>a couple of VAXs for which they have "operators".  The question was:  What
>is the difference between a system administrator and an operator?  They are
>trying to figure out the definition of system administrator in relation
>to what an operator does.  Can anyone give me an idea of how to answer this
>question?  I'm not familiar with what an "operator" does, so I couldn't
>answer the question.  Any suggestions would be welcome.

In IBM world the system administrator is called a system programmer or sysprog!

In a lot of small UNIX sites the job of operator and administrator are 
combined. (You could remove UNIX from previous sentence and it would be more
general and still correct!.) Most larger sites split the job into two with
a lower paid operator to do the donkey work and the sys-admin (sys-prog)
to do the rest.

Other posting have covered details of the job descriptions so I won't 
elaborate.

Cheers, Russell.
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