Baloney. Teaching to the test is exactly why we have so many MCP and MCSE paper professionals in the IT world that don't know jack. All they know is theory and they don't have any commonsense diagnostic skills to track down root causes of problems. They're the ones who reformat and ask questions later.
Teaching to the test teaches children one-dimensional thought processes. That makes them ill prepared for the real world where all kinds of screw ball curves are thrown at you and the text book way to solve an issue may not be the best or most efficient way to solve the problem.
I would say my comment score and the similar comments on this thread are justification enough for my points. As a potential hiring manager it is necessary to read between the lines to evaluate a potential candidate. If this thread was a job interview, this candidate would have been thrown out of the building by his comments alone.
For one, he didn't write a major application, he wrote a basic help desk application of which there are thousands of free existing applications available which could of been used or modified for his company's use.
Despite your narrow view, money is often not the main driver for a job, else we would all run our own businesses in order to control how much we make. Some people like the challenge of working with limited resources or helping to grow a struggling company. Others like the challenge of the work involved. Some like the community within the organization. Others take jobs for the learning opportunity.
He doesn't have an interest in improving the efficiency or profitability of the company because he would of just done it if he did as opposed to claiming to have a solution that *could* improve the situation and sitting on his laurels watching his teammates struggle with the daily work load.
Sitting around 20% of the time doing nothing is poor time management. He should be offering to help others with their work, training other employees, investing in his own skill set, or developing solutions to help the company (and possibly himself by way of bonuses if his work can make the company more profitable).
We have no way of knowing whether he is an employee in good standing - based on his comments and demonstrated self-entitlement, it would be easy to argue that he is not. We haven't seen what he produced "as a hobby", we just have his word. It could be total crap. As he admits on his own, he is not a programmer.
Of course it is reasonable to want more, but more isn't always equal to more money.
You need to remember that life is a job interview. Everything you do reflects on you as a person and as an employee. While you may not receive financial compensation for your work, down the road that work may be your foot in the door to a better opportunity with compensation and benefits that may outweigh the effort that was given away for the original work.
If you truly are concerned about the trustworthiness of your systems administrator; you definitely don't have the right person in place and you need to take steps NOW to ensure the continuity of your systems. Start implementing strict documentation standards for everything - passwords, system maintenance procedures, run books, network diagrams, etc... This information then needs to be stored in location accessible by senior executives and audited by an external firm to ensure completeness and validity. You have to be careful about this though, because it can be a tip off that the administrator's tenure is coming to a close shortly. It can be very costly to have your admin walk off the job with all the passwords. Your systems will be unmanageable and if the passwords can not be recovered by a forensics firm, you'll have to wipe and re-implement the affected systems. Better to have a discussion with all employees and say that the company has come under regulatory scrutiny, or some other excuse, and that all departments must now thoroughly document everything they do. Then everybody is on an equal playing field and employees are less likely to think more into it.
As far as backups go, bring in an external firm to configure, perform, monitor, and audit the backups. The best system would be an off-site mirror of your data center managed by this firm. But tape archives can be effective as well. Either way, your administrator would be discouraged from tampering with the backups, as an audit would immediately show any attempts at sabotage. But even with backups, you could be talking about days of downtime before all systems could be restored, so best to fix the human problem first before you even get to this point.
I went into a local community college with a team of talented system engineers after they were forced to fire their hands-on IT manager. They neglected to get typed and validated documentation from him before they kicked him out, and it took us days to crack all of the passwords and document all of the systems and networks. I estimate it probably cost the college at least $20,000 for this forensics work because they didn't handle the situation properly.
Popularity does not determine monopoly status. If there was any merit to the tying of an O/S to hardware, than the government would of acted long before now. Regardless of popularity the government would have to act if a company practiced anti-competitive behavior.
In the mainframe market, which is the only thing that matters here, there are competitors to IBM and those are Oracle (via Sun) and Hewlett-Packard. Therefore no monopoly can exist and any claims of anti-trust are invalid.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.