This reminds me of my undergrad CPSC days. The CPSC department had their own *nix-based mainframe system that was separate from the rest of the University. The sysadmin was a pretty smart guy who was making less than a third of what he could get in industry. Eventually he got fed up and left. About a week or two later the servers had a whole cascade of failures that resulted in everyone losing every last bit of work they'd done over the weekend (This was a weekend near the end of the semester when everyone was in crunch mode).
Long story short, the sysadmin was hired back and paid more than most of the profs. Academia may tend to skimp on salaries for certain positions, but sysadmins probably shouldn't be one of them.
You know what? Fuck them. Fuck higher education completely. Undervalued and underpaid is the name of the game for any important IT roles in that shit hole of an industry.
To be fair, a lot of the people working in support roles in academia are pretty much unemployable in the real world. They show up at 10 am, take constant smoke breaks all day, and leave at 3 pm. When I was in physics (which used the main university servers for most things) we had a sysadmin who was in charge of some printers and a couple of server boxes. He had inherited those boxes from a former student who set them up, but he was functionally illiterate in managing them. At one point I needed a package installed. Not only could he not figure out how to install a package on a ubuntu server on his own, he couldn't do it with emailed instructions either. I had to go up and physically stand over him telling him what to click on and what to type. To make matters worse, he was so hard to actually catch "in the office", that I had to have the department secretary (whose office he was next to) alert me when he showed up. Not surprisingly, the functions of those servers were soon moved to desktop machines in various offices. As far as I know he's still working there though. He's a union employee and it would be a ride through deepest, hottest, hell to get rid of him.
Note: I am not saying all university support staff are like this. Some definitely are though, and they're probably the reason why good people sometimes find it hard to be properly remunerated in academia.
> Note: I am not saying all university support staff are like this. Some definitely are though, and they're probably the reason why good people sometimes find it hard to be properly remunerated in academia.
Certainly not everyone is like him - but I'd wager every university has at least a couple of people like him (we definitely had one, again, in physics)
Long story short, the sysadmin was hired back and paid more than most of the profs. Academia may tend to skimp on salaries for certain positions, but sysadmins probably shouldn't be one of them.