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sysadmins are kind of a dying breed where what's left at this point is mostly split into either the IT sector (which seems like it's mainly Windows admins and M

sysadmins are kind of a dying breed where what's left at this point is mostly split into either the IT sector (which seems like it's mainly Windows admins and MSPs supporting small businesses) or the programming side of things with "DevOps" and "SRE" and other neo-admin nonsense. So personally I just mostly hang out in programming focused spaces or just general tech communities like a couple imageboards. Sadly, the neo-admin sphere really isn't the same as sysadmin, because the culture is just entirely different. Granted I'm way too young to have been there for the good old days (God I should have just become a programmer) but from what I've seen of it, sysadmins had this individualistic old school tech culture that almost bordered on being kind of punk rock. Back then solving the problems required of an admin was something that could be done with shell scripts or Perl, so each individual sysadmin could have their own bespoke suite of scripts they'd written all on their own, but as time has gone on and the tech industry has exploded, suddenly everything supposedly has to be able to infinitely scale up. Everything becomes more homogenized and there's no longer any room for a BOFH type character rebelling against middle management and the corporate world, because his job is being replaced by an assembly line CI/CD mentality. It's quite simply the transition the Industrial Revolution ushered in from skilled artisan labor to unskilled industrial labor being repeated in the tech industry. That's not to say there aren't fundamental problems with Linux and other Unix-like OSes that made the transition necessary, but a lot of the draw for me personally as an admin person was the culture and the identity, aside from just also getting into technology via chan tech boards that got me interested in tinkering with Linux specifically. The DevOps mindset of everything being a disposable Docker container and everything being configured in YAML instead of an actual scripting language (unless you're writing small tools with Python I guess) just isn't the same as being master of all the unique, on-site servers you admin and have taken care in naming.

xje 5y ago
This really resonated with me as it's what I've observed but couldn't word quite as well. I too am too young and late to the party. Raised and taught by Windows sysadmins who got their start in the early 2000s just before the dotcom crash. I was basically molded into a Windows sysadmin from a young age. I started to hate Windows around when Vista came out because of the UAC restrictions my old man would place on my PC, preventing me from playing with new software or using my computer late into the night, so I started experimenting with Linux live CDs. Fast forward 10 years. Debian is my daily driver. I only use Windows at work. I can't really code (cognitive thing, doesn't quite click), but I'm comfy in a terminal environment, I can rewrite config files, deploy OSes, do other hardware, admin, and network tasks easily. Tried to find anybody that would take me for this type of work, but in this area, everyone making under $100k is remote IT from companies with names like "G.S. International Computers", and the environments are always outsourced call centers with headsets, techs being forced to drive into the city to do something that's still remote. Ended up in a call center like that, slowly dying inside, trying to get out but every role I can find is a worse version of this one. It's homogenized as you put it, no more room for the IT crowd kind. Tickets and timers and management cracking the whip, out of touch with you, and you have no idea what the customer's network looks like until they call. On the hook for an army of decaying Windows machines at remote sites, that the business side says it's too expensive to replace. Friend's dad is still a sysadmin, one of that dying breed, has a lot of free time to write poetry and shitpost. My old man is a project manager somewhere now, he hasn't touched hardware in 15 years. I still can't find a niche despite all the people I seem to know. Thinking about giving it up as a career.

xje 5y ago

This really resonated with me as it's what I've observed but couldn't word quite as well. I too am too young and late to the party. Raised and taught by Windows sysadmins who got their start in the early 2000s just before the dotcom crash. I was basically molded into a Windows sysadmin from a young age. I started to hate Windows around when Vista came out because of the UAC restrictions my old man would place on my PC, preventing me from playing with new software or using my computer late into the night, so I started experimenting with Linux live CDs. Fast forward 10 years. Debian is my daily driver. I only use Windows at work. I can't really code (cognitive thing, doesn't quite click), but I'm comfy in a terminal environment, I can rewrite config files, deploy OSes, do other hardware, admin, and network tasks easily. Tried to find anybody that would take me for this type of work, but in this area, everyone making under $100k is remote IT from companies with names like "G.S. International Computers", and the environments are always outsourced call centers with headsets, techs being forced to drive into the city to do something that's still remote. Ended up in a call center like that, slowly dying inside, trying to get out but every role I can find is a worse version of this one. It's homogenized as you put it, no more room for the IT crowd kind. Tickets and timers and management cracking the whip, out of touch with you, and you have no idea what the customer's network looks like until they call. On the hook for an army of decaying Windows machines at remote sites, that the business side says it's too expensive to replace. Friend's dad is still a sysadmin, one of that dying breed, has a lot of free time to write poetry and shitpost. My old man is a project manager somewhere now, he hasn't touched hardware in 15 years. I still can't find a niche despite all the people I seem to know. Thinking about giving it up as a career.