Crummy Unix Admins
I was chatting with a friend of mine this morning and he told me that the unix admins at his place unilaterally decided to place machines on a weekly reboot list rather than figure out a problem with the automounter. While I understand the need for triage, and dealing with a production problem in the short-term different than the long-term, it's sad to see highly-paid unix admins stopping with the short-term fix ("reboot it!") when the real solution may be difficult to find, but the right thing to do.
I had a recent run-in with a unix admin in the Far East who thought that I needed to logout each night because excessively long logins consume inodes that aren't returned to the system except on logout. This was filling up the /var partitiion on a box. Now, I'm no dummy... and while the /var partition might have been full, I can't imagine how the length of a login has anything to do with it. I can imagine processes that generate a lot of messages for /var/log/messages might be an issue, but that's got nothing to do with a single login.
It's these kinds of "excuses" that make it hard to defend my industry and career to others not in this industry. I'm sure these kinds of folks are everywhere - Dilbert has legions of fans that claim that the same thing was happening to them just the other day. But there's a pride in your profession that it's hard to maintain when you realize that your profession is really no better than Dilbert's.