While I agree with you that Professional Skill (Sysadmin) is probably the best way to go, Kromm has endorsed using Expert Skills for real professions, even adventuring ones. Expert Skill (Tradecraft) was published, after discussion, and now exists for spies.
I’d already started using Professional Skill (Intelligence Officer) for all the things the job entails which aren’t cool adventuring stuff like Influence skills, i.e. knowing all the standard ways to communicate with agents and your supervisors, how to use communications discipline to avoid giving away information, what to do when you think you are being followed, and basically the learned discipline of not making mundane mistakes which telegraph ‘I am a spy’ to the other side. It’s what you roll against for Job Rolls and failure would probably mean a black mark on your record for doing something a supervisor cautioned you could get you fired.
After the Expert Skill (Tradecraft) came out, I kept both skills, with mutual defaults, with Expert Skill (Tradecraft) being what you need to plan an operation or set up a network of agents and the protocols to receive their product and task them with something. Basically, the difference between Soldier and Tactics, but for intelligence officers.
I can see that, sure. But what about defaults to or from Computer Operation, Electronics Operation (Communications), Electronics Repair (Communications) or Electronics Repair (Computers)?
Anything which is connected to a network of some kind uses electronics which fall under (Communications), from telegraph and phone lines to more modern connections.
I am now wildly out of the library loop, but keeping modern libraries goes requires somebody to have extensive specialist skills.
Things I know it includes:
maintaining a catalogue system running on a wide range of devices; in many cases this is secretly fishing records out of a dozen other, ancient local systems. Compatability and character representation have improved, but it certainly used to involve completely unrelated and often homebrew systems for each non-Roman writing system in play.
trying to maintain online access to ebooks and ejournals from dozens of sources with conflicting systems, authentication methods, permissions, etc. etc. I suspect this, like the above, is Professional Skill (Sysadmin)? Keeping track of it all certainly requires Administration for the countless spreadsheets you will be keeping.
getting and processing data on library use for the reports your boss’ boss is constantly demanding: Computer Operation + Administration (or possibly Mathematics) + Writing.
finding obscure materials requested by academics: as Roger says, Research + Area Knowledge and often + the relevant subject skill, though Diplomacy works wonders for actually obtaining it (so do Contacts).
the librarians-as-in-people-you-ever-see-in-libraries tend to rely on Professional Skill (Librarian) for the much simpler stuff I was ever involved in.
It’s been very rare for Electronics Repair to be relevant. It is at the current place, because it’s a tiny organisation and I chose to make it so, but mostly if a machine physically fails it will be replaced or repaired by someone else. (And I’m very un-Cloudy compared with most sysadmins these days.) Definitely a separate skill.
Is there anything that is part of the job, that is EO (Comms), that isn’t already covered by Computer Operation? OK, I can point to that a bit: the Networks people (at the first two jobs) were essentially sysadmins who didn’t touch the Unix-based machines that we worked on but specialised in EO (Comms) and ER (Comms), which obviously overlaps a bit with ER (Computers) when the communications device is a specialised computer. In a campaign of this detail I would probably give those guys Professional Skill (Network Adminstration) with defaults to all those, though minimally for ER (Computers).
But we definitely had to be good at Computer Operation. And fairly wide ranging, various different operating systems including some very basic ones which one might describe as EO (Comms) on the same basis as above.
I think there are many jobs where the results are better if you make your skill rolls with some margin of success. Anything being done for artistic effect is an example, but jobs where you have to keep a lot of plates spinning, like a pub landlord or a sysadmin, also seem to benefit from that.
It’s widely variable, and it’s changed over time. Now, it’s possible to run a huge environment that only exists in software, running on Other People’s Computers (which, for some reason, is called “the cloud”). I know (and knew, old sysadmins do die…) some dinosaur herders, and they all had stories about fixing hardware, analyzing circuits with test equipment to see what was really going on, as opposed to what the documentation said, writing disk emulators in Excel[1], and doing lots of fiddly wire tracing.
My first sysadmin job – in the middle of the last decade of the last millennium – was for a college CS department, with essentially no money. I fixed lots of stuff, board level repairs on disk drives, monitors, printers. My next job was at a small ISP. A predecessor had built a bunch of power distribution for racks of modems, and I spent a fair amount of effort making that as reliable as possible, until they got replaced with line card stuff. After that, I worked somewhere I was not allowed to touch the hardware. I mean that literally. I was normally thousands o miles away from it, but made site visits for upgrades, system commissionings, and other such events, and when I went into the data center, I couldn’t touch anything, I had to get a tech to do it, which is great fun when you’re trying to do something like repair a hosed filesystem. jobs since, I rarely even really knew where the hardware was.
[1] Not a joke, but that was done in modern times for a museum machine
That is certainly the way I run things. If a customer, client, partner or witness could be anything from grudgingly satisfied to amazed at how everything went so smoothly and came off perfectly, I’ll assume that margin of success (and any relevant Reaction bonuses of the character whose performance is being evaluated) determines how satisfied they are.