Usual bullshit. The job of sysadmin is to recognize how systems have been designed, based on which first principles and what are the alternatives. This is how

Usual bullshit. The job of sysadmin is to recognize how systems have been designed, based on which first principles and what are the alternatives. This is how one ends up with Postgres instead MySQL (or Informix instead of Oracle) with Scala instead of Ruby (because you do understand principles Scala is based upon), with Erlang instead of Java (you do understand the differences and principles),etc. Basically, sysadmin is a system (or service) designer and architect. Nowadays the term sysadmin is used to describe a job of issuing memorized commands to AWS or some "containers" without any deep understanding of what dynamic linking is, what is libraries and API visioning, how to compile from sources and run several versions of some sets of libs, how to recompile a source package disabling unnecessary features, and so on. This is the same nonsense as to call an auto-mechanic an engineer. Most of moderns sysadmins does not know what the ./configure; make; make install sequence or a syntax of Makefiles or how the mess they called cmake works. (how many here knows how to write RPM's spec?)) Old school sysadmins are engineers, not mechanics. They do understand access patterns, data-structures, memory allocation techniques, what are shortcomings of posix threads and its naive usage, and, of course, programming paradigms, so they could reason (more objectively than managers or other laymen) about behavior of a system. They think that running a Hadoop on AWS (from ready images) is a big deal. btw, in my 20 years of being sysadmin (since SCO Open Server and FreeBSD 2.0) everything worked.