Whatever Happened to Sysadmins?

Question

I got my start in this industry fifteen years ago at the ripe age of 14 as a summer intern in Akamai Technology's sysadmin department. After finishing college, moving countries, and waiting for a year to get my passport sorted out, I finally took a job as a Cloud Administrator -- and it struck me that I haven't seen anyone seriously trying to hire for a "System Administrator" in a looooooong time, even though I personally think starting as a sysadmin and now finally moving into a role as a software lead at my current org was instrumental in me building up not only the right skills but the right instincts to debug many kinds of problems.To me the sysadmin role always felt analogous to an Apache scout or something, where one's deep knowledge of the computational terrain they inhabit is of primary importance; in other words it was the ultimate version of "the best solution is the one which requires the fewest lines of code" -- no need to roll by hand what `awk` or `systemd` or BSD jails or what have you can already do, much better, and in a much more thoroughly tested way than what you as an IC could do. Indeed to this day when I work with people who started on the sysadmin side and only later made the jump to SWE I find it easier to communicate with them because I know there's this shared scout sense we both possess.What's the deal? I have my own theories as to the decline, but I'm curious to know your thoughts.

solardev · Accepted Answer

They just specialized into various cloud providers and services instead. Nobody runs major sites on bare metal Unix anymore, and a lot of vendors automated the basic sys admin tasks such that you're using managing their dashboards and configurations instead of the OS itself or some GNU tool.But there's still plenty of backend, devops, SRE, cloud whatevers, etc. if that's what you want to do. Probably you'll be working for a infra provider rather than a business itself, like the old days, though.

reacharavindh · Answer

Systems Administrator -> Cloud Engineer -> Infrastructure Engineer -> Site Reliability Engineer.The more to the right, the less I had to interact with bare metal servers, but apply my knowledge of building them and operating almost every day.

codingdave · Answer

I don't think the job went away, it is just that the titles have evolved as the role has expanded to include modern solutions. Keep in mind that before "IT" was "IT", tech departments were called "Data Processing". Still would be an accurate title, but there is so much more going on now that more nuanced descriptions are used.

xyzzy123 · Answer

Instead of racking servers I write JavaScript that describes how the servers would be racked if they were real servers. Instead of editing ad-hoc text files in /etc/ now I edit yaml files that embed what those files had in them.

mikewarot · Answer

I was "The IT Guy", with a title of "Manager, Information Systems", for a small trade-show company. In the beginning, I had 40 hours of work/week keeping everything working, and all the users happy. 15 years later, things got so reliable, or migrated to phones and the cloud, that I essentially just showed up and waited for things to break, with about 50 users! They outsourced the job, which was smart on their part, and they haven't looked back.
For a while after that, I made gears, mostly bevel gears, until Long Covid took me out of the work force, and put me in the precariat.
I don't see systems administration as sufficiently time consuming to be a full time job anymore.

herewulf · Answer

I always saw this title as more of a jack of all trades role typically within small to medium business. Everything from managing network, on prem servers, e-mail, website, databases, backup, etc..But this is basically the role I had when I had the title, so my perspective may be biased.

THENATHE · Answer

So many small and large companies just rent cloud space for their servers, and that cloud space has 20 roles that mean "a part of sysadmin", and then the medium businesses that still have bare metal have the same 45 year old schmuck working on them because that's all he can do at this point and that is his job security, pension, and retirement.

borplk · Answer

As others mentioned the titles have changed so the same people are now DevOps, Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud Engineer, SRE, etc...
Sure the work has evolved too but a lot of the fundamentals are still the same and you still massively benefit from having that background context and history.
There are a lot of fresh "bootcamp cloud engineers" who know the buzzwords and know which buttons to click on AWS but they don't have the depth of knowledge to safely navigate on their own.
They can give you a 30 minute spiel about why you must move to serverless ASAP but ask them what 777 permission is and they have no idea.
Not that being a beginner is any issue at all if you are self-aware but some of them are lost in YAML and buzzwords and have no idea about their gaps in knowledge and experience.

wmf · Answer

It's now called SRE.

jruohonen · Answer

Cloud computing? DevOps?

Whatever Happened to Sysadmins?

Systems Administrator -> Cloud Engineer -> Infrastructure Engineer -> Site Reliability Engineer.
The more to the right, the less I had to interact with bare metal servers, but apply my knowledge of building them and operating almost every day.

Instead of racking servers I write JavaScript that describes how the servers would be racked if they were real servers. Instead of editing ad-hoc text files in /etc/ now I edit yaml files that embed what those files had in them.

I always saw this title as more of a jack of all trades role typically within small to medium business. Everything from managing network, on prem servers, e-mail, website, databases, backup, etc..
But this is basically the role I had when I had the title, so my perspective may be biased.

It's now called SRE.

Cloud computing? DevOps?