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Ask HN: Is Systems Engineering / Infrastructure Eng. / Sys Administration Dead?
After my most recent job searches, I've been rudely awakened to the fact that systems engineering is barely in existence anymore. People with Systems knowledge as their first-class skillset have been replaced with software developers with SOME systems knowledge.
The cycle in companies seems to be: devs make infra, early on. Infra either doesn't scale, or it's too time consuming / painful to maintain and sometimes lacks redundancy, monitoring, and so forth. Next, companies seek to hire more devs, except devs that have significant systems experience: AWS, load balancing, configuration management, etc. They have trouble finding these so salaries for what has become "DevOps" have ballooned. Now to be a DevOps means to understand math algorithms, lots of software architecture, lots of AWS, and basic Linux skills.
I've been a Linux infrastructure engineer / SA / SRE / "DevOps" for the past 15+ years. I've been writing code (first Perl, now Python) for most of that time. I've been setting up configuration management (first custom stuff, now Puppet/Ansible/etc.) for most of that time. I've always considered that a Systems / Linux Administrator who can't code or automate well is either junior or not very good. I have a strong understanding of Linux internals.
Yet, I am finding myself forced to rebrand as a DEVELOPER, as in these "DevOps" roles I'm asked very little about my core skillset: Linux, and a lot about algorithms, coding and CI systems.
Is the future of systems administration actually full-blown software development?
Do you have a similar story?
- mancerayder 9y agoIn my opinion, systems people are the ones who predict how to correctly architect infrastructure environments in order to minimize downtime, maximize scalability and minimize operational overhead. My gut feeling is that companies are doing themselves a disservice by focusing on core software development skills and minimal engineering on the systems side.
- danenania 9y agoI think there's a ton of value in people who are experts in systems and stay focused in that area, but I do see the importance of sys admins also being developers and having firsthand understanding of the developer perspective. On the other side of the coin, it's also very important that developers (particularly senior developers) have a healthy understanding of the full pipeline that brings code from their laptop to end-users. These two realms of software are yin and yang. How to best approach one depends on your approach to the other, and vice versa. If developers and sys admins don't have quite a lot of overlap, the goals that each are optimizing for can diverge pretty quickly. 'DevOps' seems to have emerged out of people's recognition of this problem. All that said, you could well be right that companies are overweighting development knowledge and underweighting the ops side. It's easy to end up with 'ops debt' that becomes crushing when developers put off dealing with it for too long.
- vgy7ujm 9y agoSysadmins have become operators unless they learned to code and rebranded themselves devops. Operator salaries sucks so people are careful not to be associated with sysadmin/operator stigma, it's just easier to say developer/devops to stay relevant for higher paid jobs.
- bradknowles 9y agoHardware administration has shifted left. Most places work in VMs these days, and many have little or no hardware of their own at all. More and more hardware is being owned and operated by fewer and fewer big shops, many of whom provide services to those who need VMs. Classic systems administration is also shifting left. Either you go with the shift, or you find a way to make yourself useful to those who are left. What is called DevOps today would be a case of the latter, although there are those of us who have been doing that same kind of stuff for twenty, thirty, or even more years - we were doing DevOps before DevOps was a name that had been coined. As more and more stuff moves into the cloud, many of us will become Platform Engineers. We don’t do DevOps much any more, except for the big platforms that really need that. The rest will be providing the tools and guard rails that the developers need to allow them to do quick self-service with “serverless” frameworks, built on top of the tools provided by the big cloud providers.