My experence (Score 1)

I have administered Linux, Windows and MAC servers and from reading the comments above I must agree (in part at least) with everyone. I think a balance needs to be given to downtime/finding the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is certainly important, but so is availability! Different situations require different solutions. Personally I always prefer to get things working as soon as possible but while troubleshooting the problem take steps so that once the issue has been fixed it is possible to find out what went wrong (unless you find out along the way) by backing up logs... If you can get the system back up in a reasonable time and tell management why/how/what happened then this is the best situation for everyone. With windows this is more difficult and you are a lot more likely to encounter a problem with windows which seems to have no reason (I know this does not really happen but it appears that way because of the rubbish logging that windows produces). So I guess what I am saying is a competent systems administrator will know how to react in certain situations and these systems administrators are nearly always worth the money (unless, of course, the companies systems aren't that important). About the imaging route, I've always disliked this solution. It requires you to have a spear machine of exactly the same spec. I prefer to set up an automated install (over tftp) for all of the different types of machines I administer. With the Unix based OS's I then use puppet to configure them fully (the client should be available to windows soon also), so if a reinstall is needed I could use a completely different set of hardware (if needed) and get things up and running in a short amount of time. This takes time to get set up initially but it means that anyone who can figure out how to PXE boot a machine on the network can effectively start an install for any type of machine using only 5 minutes of their time and the systems administrator is more free to figure out ways to increase efficiency of the systems and network (every system can always be improved). I do not think this is the end of systems administrators, it just means that we need to up our game.