Quantifying experience & skill

Solution 1:

I am told by my coworkers that they think I have a very good memory. I can tell you even with my good memory I always refer to documentation and notes daily. I could not live without our Documentation wiki, my personal Evernote information, my VCS repository of scripts.

When you are a general consultant like I am and are expected to know a little about everything it is just not possible to have every single thing memorized. Perhaps people that work in large IT shops may be able to focus on a particular thing long enough to actually internalize lots of details. But when you are doing something different every day it just isn't possible.

In my opinion the important thing for you to do is to make sure you organize your notes bookmarks, links to manuals and such so you can lookup things quickly. Write yourself documentation. Store your scripts and command lines in a version control system. Instead of trying to memorize everything, simply work on setting yourself up systems so you can find things you need quickly.

Solution 2:

So here's my own take:

1. Don't expect to know everything about everything. Just know where to look it up, and have the confidence to do something about it.
2. Learn frameworks, not technologies. Technologies change too fast to deeply embed yourself into. Learn the reasons WHY you need them or HOW they should be configured. When a replacement technology appears you can judge the replacement on it's own terms, not one supplied to you by a vendor.
3. Take notes and keep a worklog. Notes can be snippets of code, confuration file notes, and even command line entries. Worklogs are notes of your actions as you take them, with a time and date stamp.
4. The ideal system administrator (in my mind) is a generalist not a specialist. Generalists need to know many things, and how they interact. Read 108 Task a SysAdmin Might Do.

Keep reading documentation, most people don't.

Solution 3:

Perfectly normal. The human brain isn't very good at absorbing such quantities of specific information, like arguments and configuration syntax, unless you are frequently typing them over and over.

Experience manifests itself in the ability to quickly locate information rather than recall the finite details from memory, in my opinion. If you know what you are looking for (from previous experience) and you know where to get it (man pages, search engines, mailing lists, etc) then you needn't store all of that detail.

This can make it slightly harder to self-quantify your experience and is probably the cause of your doubt. I have pondered the same in the past. But from working alongside less experienced admins it should be easy to recognise the difference in your methodologies, speed and ultimately, skill.

Solution 4:

I don't find it abnormal that you refer to the documentation on a regular basis -- no point remembering it all if it's written down. What I do find a bit strange is that you don't appear to have put much into automating all your common administrative tasks, with personal documentation, notes, scripts, etc. I hate doing anything more than once, so I'll write something down for myself for next time I need to do it, then refer to that more frequently than the official documentation (although that's always there if I need to clarify a point or deal with something I haven't quite dealt with before).