Sysadmins were supposed to “go away” after transitioning to the cloud. Instead, what I’ve observed is that so many years ago companies hired more and more devel

Sysadmins were supposed to “go away” after transitioning to the cloud. Instead, what I’ve observed is that so many years ago companies hired more and more developers that wound up trying to solve problems sysadmins long ago solved with little attention from developers that many are reinventing or rediscovering. This is one reason how we wound up with so many management systems like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc. But the market for sysadmins is completely soaked in corporate IT professionals whom really only have maybe 20% skill coverage with what smaller tech companies want or need. When it comes to delivering software, companies have found they want / need strong sysadmin knowledge domain with a strong software development background - this is the rise of the “devops” and SRE disciplines. What really bums me out is that long ago the term sysadmin applied to software developers as well - people on Unix systems that wrote C and other systems code that used bash to string together software fast. So in a lot of senses, the creation of bash is a form of the developer-sysadmin construct done quite well. But today, with our fractured, mercurial software ecosystem we see so many competing tools that largely do things 90%+ the same way in practice for hardly any real advantage over each other. Every option can easily manage hundreds of machines in some odd seconds or a few minutes, after all. But there’s a cultural problem that’s become a bifurcation into engineer castes over time. Go to conferences, social networks, and meet-ups for developers vs sysadmins - the tone and tenor of topics is completely different. Developer conferences have a smattering of deeply concerned talks but a majority are bright, cheery, and exploratory in tone and the side conversations match up. Sysadmins oftentimes stuck in cost centers are as a rule grumpy and even belligerent, and the side conversations remind me more of the hallways of a VA hospital than Bell Labs.