4 ms·

There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux sy

by Ruxbin1986 8y ago

There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux systems since the early 90s. It's not fancy as software development or drives business value but work that needs to be done. The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work. The only thing left is actual software development.

3pt14159 8y ago
If you've tried to hire a good sys admin in North America you'd be shocked at how high their salaries are getting. Amazon is hiring them by the boatload. Shopify is moving to all cloud because they're unable to staff. The problem is that junior sys admins aren't as useful as before to most startups. I still think they'll figure it out, but the industry is changing.
- geggam 8y ago
  This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing
  - dennisgorelik 8y ago
    The average competence is NOT reducing. What is reducing is demand for mediocre (and low) competence. This trend results in less competent people flooding the job market.
    - softawre 8y ago
      But if demand for low competence people goes down, those people aren't learning on the job, therefore decreasing the average competence of the workforce.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    ...said every generation ever about the next generation.
    - geggam 8y ago
      Sysadmins used to be able to compile a kernel and some could even hack a kernel module together. Today ? Not happening.
- AlanSE 8y ago
  Another way to look at the trend - a lot of companies are moving to the cloud because they can't get the people to do it on their own.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Doing it on the cloud is now cheaper than doing it on their own. That could be because doing it on their own has got more expensive, but I suspect that the cloud becoming cheaper is a bigger factor.
- sevensor 8y ago
  So AWS is really Amazon's play to corner the market on sysadmins? That sounds remarkably plausible.
- richardknop 8y ago
  But isn't Amazon hiring similar people as Google SREs? So they are not really looking for sys admins but more of a full fledged programmers / dev ops people who can write software, not just bash scripts.
- Ruxbin1986 8y ago
  The author is referring to traditional system administration - this is Windows - SCCM, SCOM, Exchange, SharePoint, VMware Virtualization, Citrix, Networking, etc. SRE or "DevOps" roles new roles that are similar to system administration but the biggest difference is the use of cloud technologies, automation and most importantly those in need to be or at least understand software develop and code.
icedchai 8y ago
Not really. We now call systems administrators "devops engineers" now.
- gaius 8y ago
  Just as webdevs are “full stack engineers” now
- therealdrag0 8y ago
  When my company puts out a rec for developers we get 300 applicants. When we try to get a devops, we get 3. It's tough.
jimbokun 8y ago
"The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work." It takes a hell of a lot of work to take a company's entire infrastructure and migrate it to Kubernetes and the Cloud, and then monitor and manage it. It's not trivial. So the key is seeing your job as solving a business problem with computers, not "I administer Oracle version X.y.z running on Redhat Linux".

3pt14159 8y ago

If you've tried to hire a good sys admin in North America you'd be shocked at how high their salaries are getting. Amazon is hiring them by the boatload. Shopify is moving to all cloud because they're unable to staff. The problem is that junior sys admins aren't as useful as before to most startups. I still think they'll figure it out, but the industry is changing.

geggam 8y ago
This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing
- dennisgorelik 8y ago
  The average competence is NOT reducing. What is reducing is demand for mediocre (and low) competence. This trend results in less competent people flooding the job market.
  - softawre 8y ago
    But if demand for low competence people goes down, those people aren't learning on the job, therefore decreasing the average competence of the workforce.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  ...said every generation ever about the next generation.
  - geggam 8y ago
    Sysadmins used to be able to compile a kernel and some could even hack a kernel module together. Today ? Not happening.
AlanSE 8y ago
Another way to look at the trend - a lot of companies are moving to the cloud because they can't get the people to do it on their own.
- lmm 8y ago
  Doing it on the cloud is now cheaper than doing it on their own. That could be because doing it on their own has got more expensive, but I suspect that the cloud becoming cheaper is a bigger factor.
sevensor 8y ago
So AWS is really Amazon's play to corner the market on sysadmins? That sounds remarkably plausible.
richardknop 8y ago
But isn't Amazon hiring similar people as Google SREs? So they are not really looking for sys admins but more of a full fledged programmers / dev ops people who can write software, not just bash scripts.
Ruxbin1986 8y ago
The author is referring to traditional system administration - this is Windows - SCCM, SCOM, Exchange, SharePoint, VMware Virtualization, Citrix, Networking, etc. SRE or "DevOps" roles new roles that are similar to system administration but the biggest difference is the use of cloud technologies, automation and most importantly those in need to be or at least understand software develop and code.

icedchai 8y ago

Not really. We now call systems administrators "devops engineers" now.

gaius 8y ago
Just as webdevs are “full stack engineers” now
therealdrag0 8y ago
When my company puts out a rec for developers we get 300 applicants. When we try to get a devops, we get 3. It's tough.

jimbokun 8y ago

"The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work." It takes a hell of a lot of work to take a company's entire infrastructure and migrate it to Kubernetes and the Cloud, and then monitor and manage it. It's not trivial. So the key is seeing your job as solving a business problem with computers, not "I administer Oracle version X.y.z running on Redhat Linux".