11 Facts About SysAdmin Day, the Holiday That Celebrates IT Pros
The last Friday in July has been set aside to celebrate some of the world’s most unsung heroes: Systems Administrators. These 11 facts shed light on the inception of the annual tribute to IT pros, System Administrator Appreciation Day.
Systems Administrator Appreciation Day (A.K.A. SysAdmin Day) is a day to pay tribute to the heroic men and women who prevent IT disasters, keep data secure, and ensure your computer runs without issues. How much do you know about the holiday, and have you ever celebrated it? Learn more about the annual observance and hear what your peers have to say in our Spiceworks Community discussion on SysAdmin Day.
- The holiday takes place each year on the last Friday in July and was created by Ted Keekatos, himself a Systems Administrator.
- SysAdmin Day was first celebrated in the year 2000, with Kekatos organizing a park picnic featuring a grill, burgers, and hot dogs to mark the occasion.
- The idea for SysAdmin Day was inspired by an ad for printers that featured end users lining up outside an IT professional’s cube and Administrative Professionals’ Day. Check out the discussion in the Spiceworks Community for the surprising back story on the image that sparked a global IT movement.
Image source: Infoworld/HP via Spiceworks]
- In the early days of SysAdmin Day, traffic to the official website overwhelmed the internet connection of the humble server Kekatos hosted the webpage on, which was connected to the internet through his office’s fractional T1 (meaning it had a slower than 1.54Mbps connection). This resulted in a “frantic phone call from one of the programmers who says he can’t remote into the office” because the connection was “saturated with traffic for the Sysadmin Day website.”
- SysAdmin Day remains somewhat niche and there is still much work to be done. According to a 2022 Spiceworks Job Happiness study of 1100+ IT professionals, most IT pros said they feel appreciated by their coworkers, but only 37% feel appreciated by society at large.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), an estimated 1.25 million IT support professionals were employed in the United States in 2022, including computer support specialists (914,100) and network and computer systems administrators (323,020).
- The number of these IT support/systems administration jobs in the U.S. is expected to grow by 4.6% between 2022 and 2032, from 1.25M to 1.31M, a net gain of nearly 60K jobs.
- Celebrations for SysAdmin Day in Yekaterinburg, Russia include a gathering at a giant replica of a keyboard for a computer mouse-throwing competition, where participants are judged for distance and accuracy.
- Want to express thanks for a SysAdmin in your life? According to the Systems Administrator Appreciation Day site and Spiceworks polls on gifts for IT pros, the following are good ideas: Parties featuring food, baked goods, money/gift cards, time off, a simple thank you, tech gadgets, and more.
- If you need to convince your coworkers to celebrate the holiday, Spiceworks created a very helpful flyer explaining why SysAdmins deserve a beer. Designed to hang up around the office to give not-so-subtle hints about the holiday, IT professionals have used this infographic successfully to score free drinks and food.
- Numerous songs have been created by individuals and tech brands to celebrate IT professionals and SysAdmin Day. Below are a few popular examples from Spiceworks and beyond.
How much do you know about SysAdmin Day?
Do you have any fun facts about Sysadmin Day or personal experiences to share?
