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I've been hearing this for the past 20 years. And now my sysadmin skills are more and more in demand. For the past 5 years or so I started making more money tha

I've been hearing this for the past 20 years. And now my sysadmin skills are more and more in demand. For the past 5 years or so I started making more money than a dev because of supply and demand. Rent to AWS actually drives demand up quite a lot since the bills are huge and very few people understand what is under the hood and how it can be optimized. I doubt very much things will change in the near future. In the far one... who knows. Edit: car mechanics with their own shop make significantly more money than me and it seems to only get better for them as cars become more complex.

ugjka 5y ago
The low level stuff won't magically disappear, you still will need someone who can debug the kernel or whatever is under the hood when shit blows up in everyone's face
dymax78 5y ago
> Rent to AWS actually drives demand up quite a lot since the bills are huge and very few people understand what is under the hood and how it can be optimized. A few years ago I participated in a Splunk deployment and the cloud solution utterly dwarfed an in-house enterprise solution, in regards to cost. Even in the event that cost was irrelevant, certain sectors (financial institution(s)) are going to have a difficult time pivoting to a cloud-based solution and relinquishing control over the underlying infrastructure.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you find old-school sysadmin gigs? I find that everything nowadays requires knowing the specifics of a particular cloud and their managed services as opposed to raw Linux or networking knowledge.
- trabant00 5y ago
  There are few to none outright old-school sysadmin gigs. You have to know the cloud providers specifics. Also everything about containers. And Go. But once you get through the door at a new job the massive difference between somebody who understands what is under the hood and somebody who just got an AWS certification with no prior knowlwdge becomes apparent to all. Quick position and paycheck raises follow.
lambdaba 5y ago
Hey I'm super interested in such sysadmin work if you could describe it here or share it on another channel (email in bio). Many thanks.
- trabant00 5y ago
  What exactly are you interested in finding out? What I do every day? How you can find such work? Or?
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    Yes, basically if I could peek into your activity for a day it would be awesome (I'm not asking that, although I would like it :P :)). I'm just curious of what a day's work looks like.
    - trabant00 5y ago
      Typical day is actually mostly working to go around corporate "security" limitations that restrict everybody to not being able to do much for fear they will do harm. The last few days: - we have a commercial ssh bastion that requires direct ssh login and then input ip address. So no dns available for sshing. I wrote a bash autocomplete script that resolves dns host entries and uses expect to automatically input the ip in the bastion. This is especially important to be able to run ansible. - our gitlab has it's ssh filtered because "security". So you can only use a security token over http. This prevents us from being able to use git submodukes, as the token would be in ckear commited to the parent rep. So I wrote a make file to compose the project, basically a poor man git submodules. You might find all the above trivial, and it is. But it keeps the work flowing and devips more junior than I have no clue about make files, expect, etc.
      - lambdaba 5y ago
        Thank you! Yes, that was my suspicion as well.

ugjka 5y ago

The low level stuff won't magically disappear, you still will need someone who can debug the kernel or whatever is under the hood when shit blows up in everyone's face

dymax78 5y ago

> Rent to AWS actually drives demand up quite a lot since the bills are huge and very few people understand what is under the hood and how it can be optimized. A few years ago I participated in a Splunk deployment and the cloud solution utterly dwarfed an in-house enterprise solution, in regards to cost. Even in the event that cost was irrelevant, certain sectors (financial institution(s)) are going to have a difficult time pivoting to a cloud-based solution and relinquishing control over the underlying infrastructure.

Nextgrid 5y ago

Out of curiosity, how do you find old-school sysadmin gigs? I find that everything nowadays requires knowing the specifics of a particular cloud and their managed services as opposed to raw Linux or networking knowledge.

trabant00 5y ago
There are few to none outright old-school sysadmin gigs. You have to know the cloud providers specifics. Also everything about containers. And Go. But once you get through the door at a new job the massive difference between somebody who understands what is under the hood and somebody who just got an AWS certification with no prior knowlwdge becomes apparent to all. Quick position and paycheck raises follow.

lambdaba 5y ago

Hey I'm super interested in such sysadmin work if you could describe it here or share it on another channel (email in bio). Many thanks.

trabant00 5y ago
What exactly are you interested in finding out? What I do every day? How you can find such work? Or?
- lambdaba 5y ago
  Yes, basically if I could peek into your activity for a day it would be awesome (I'm not asking that, although I would like it :P :)). I'm just curious of what a day's work looks like.
  - trabant00 5y ago
    Typical day is actually mostly working to go around corporate "security" limitations that restrict everybody to not being able to do much for fear they will do harm. The last few days: - we have a commercial ssh bastion that requires direct ssh login and then input ip address. So no dns available for sshing. I wrote a bash autocomplete script that resolves dns host entries and uses expect to automatically input the ip in the bastion. This is especially important to be able to run ansible. - our gitlab has it's ssh filtered because "security". So you can only use a security token over http. This prevents us from being able to use git submodukes, as the token would be in ckear commited to the parent rep. So I wrote a make file to compose the project, basically a poor man git submodules. You might find all the above trivial, and it is. But it keeps the work flowing and devips more junior than I have no clue about make files, expect, etc.
    - lambdaba 5y ago
      Thank you! Yes, that was my suspicion as well.