Should SysAdmin Day Be Renamed to “DevOps Day”?

Question

SysAdmin seems like a term from long time ago, where admins mounted hardware in 19" racks, installed cables and were typically found in a dark room with tons of hardware pieces, sitting in front of a display with an terminal and installing a Linux distro manually.Today's admin work (if you can call it still "admin work") is completely different: Writing YAML code for your automation tools, checking the CI/CD pipeline and deploying stuff to the cloud. The industry gave this kind of work the term "DevOps".Classic sysadmins are an extinct species. Shouldn't this day therefore not better be called "DevOps Day"?Happy SysAdmin Day :-)

greenbit · Accepted Answer

I don't think they're extinct at all. Maybe in businesses where the product ('service' if you will) is highly or completely network oriented, you can get the fusion of back-end/network-facing that seems to be attracting the term DevOps, but in a lot of businesses where the products are actual products, it seems useful to keep the distinction between engineers who develop product and the SysAdmins who keep the company infrastructure intact. Granted the latter model gets blurry when the product is something that, once delivered, will be in contact with the wild internet - but the difference is still there, in that sure the engineers need to worry about some of the traditional SysAdmin concerns, but the actual SysAdmins are the people that are going to "come in" when it's your company's own computers need attention. And that's worthy of some appreciation. Thanks for all you do, SysAdmins!

LinuxBender · Answer

I would propose just making a "DevOps Day" as Sysadmins, Developers and DevOps are very different roles and ways of solving problems. Sysadmins should be able to keep their day. [1] Developers also have their own day. [2] Some do shift or evolve into each others roles to varying degrees and some do not. Without going into a long drawn out explanation of the differences that do still exist I believe that each have a distinct set of expectations and responsibilities and each provide significant contributions to an organizations needs and each come with a distinct mind-set. The only downside is that DevOps Day might get confused with DevOps Days [3] Or consider thinking of it this way, DevOps already have the two days linked below.[1][2]
All of this said, I think that people should consider changing or redirecting that wiki page for "Day of the Programmer" to "Day of the Developer" maybe.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Administrator_Appreciat...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Programmer
[3] - https://devopsdays.org/