I'm curious about the employee-to-sysadmin ratio you see in your organizations. My company has 65 people and 1.5 sysadmins, which gives us a ratio of 43 employees for each sysadmin. Most of our team lacks advanced computer skills; they mostly just use email and documents. However, there's still a significant need for support with tasks like password resets, server upgrades, and printer repairs. It feels like this ratio is quite high—our sysadmins are always busy handling urgent issues, and those of us with more complex needs often find ourselves competing for their time. What's the employee-per-sysadmin ratio at your workplace, and what do you think is a reasonable number?
5 Answers
In my place, we've got 1 sysadmin for every 150 employees. It includes all IT support staff, so it's not too bad, but still quite busy during peak times.
We have around 2000 employees and 6 service desk members along with 4 app support. I find it pretty low, plus we've only got 4 people in infrastructure—a lot of users for too few hands!
Wow, that’s a lot of users for so few sysadmins. Similar situation here; we have 1500 employees and only 2 sysadmins, and it feels stretched.
It sounds chaotic! Balancing that many tasks across so many users is a recipe for burnout.
I’m part of a 20-year-old startup with 2 sysadmins for 75 employees, plus around 40 contractors. The constant management changes really stretch us thin; we often have to ignore routine issues to tackle new initiatives and pushes from management.
We operate with a ratio of about 4 sysadmins to 600 employees. With 1,000 devices and 200 servers, we’re always on call. It definitely feels overwhelming at times. I can relate to your situation about users needing support; balancing that with infrastructure tasks is a challenge.
I feel you on that. We have 400 employees and 2.5 sysadmins, which often means everyone wears many hats. It’s tough when everyone expects immediate support.
With that number of servers for your user count, it's manageable but still a decent workload. Good luck keeping up!
Honestly, our employee-to-sysadmin ratio is about 1:2000! There’s just one of me handling the front line, and I also work on several other development and operations tasks, so it gets hectic real quick!
Yikes, that is a heavy load! I can only imagine the juggling act every day.
I hear you! It’s all about maximizing efficiency when you’re that outnumbered.

That's a pretty solid ratio! Having support staff helps share the load.