You know what.. I am supposedly skilled sysadmin, middleware admin and a DBA, so let's assume I know what I mean. And I dare to say that for many cases many tas

You know what.. I am supposedly skilled sysadmin, middleware admin and a DBA, so let's assume I know what I mean. And I dare to say that for many cases many tasks usually attributed to "us" can be automatized (and who's writing such layer? of course an admin, not a programmer; a casual programmer doesn't have mindset needed). I earn money on the large projects (telco industry mostly) where people like us are absolutely needed and without us the things would turn into chaos & hell. Still you don't need an admin to build an infractructure for a small app when you have service providers like Heroku. Then admin can be given another work to do (esp. coding, as most of admins make excellent coders, not necessarily vice-versa). You may think these are quite strong opinions, inconvenient for some people maybe, but I live in the industry for 15 years or so and that's what I see all around.