I feel like this version of "sysadmin" went out of favor some time ago. Back in the early '00s I got my start in industry as a sysadmin, working in non-SV star

I feel like this version of "sysadmin" went out of favor some time ago. Back in the early '00s I got my start in industry as a sysadmin, working in non-SV startups. Although I had taken courses in C++ and could muddle through it, I seldom did much low level programming - the C/C++ knowledge I did have was helpful to read code, submit the occasional bug report, and understand the rube-goldberg build processes which really seemed to be in style at the time. Most of the code I wrote was the kind of glue you needed to make sites work and web-ify basic tooling so normal users could access it - and that meant hacking in shell, perl, or python. These things I simply took for granted as part of a sysadmin's job. As the "web" stuff really took off, that eventually landed me doing more with PHP, Django, and Rails. All of these things matched my conception of what a "sysadmin" would be, but the industry seemed to disagree with me. I worked in other sectors and came to realize there were a lot of "sysadmins" who not only didn't know how to code anything, but also had no interest in learning anything. Eventually I just stopped being a sysadmin and started being a web developer. Now here we are, with devops and SREs, and I smirk a little. The guy coding up web sites to present internal metrics and writing software to facilitate point-and-click deployments while dropping into Valgrind to help out a lost developer? He's an SRE, I'm sure. But then, so is the guy in the next cube over, who worked the help desk for a couple months and really knows how to click install and reboot. These labels come and go and they mean different things at different places. Like "agile" or "devops" - once they escape the FAANGs, they start to lose all real meaning.