I agree with most of what you say, and in particular with companies' love for the term, but I disagree that "the work remains largely the same". When I got star

I agree with most of what you say, and in particular with companies' love for the term, but I disagree that "the work remains largely the same". When I got started on this line of work, we used cvs to track program code and we used backups to 'track' infrastructure, including code used to manage the infra (mostly shell scripts, though not only that). There's a long path from that to ansible and terraform on SCM. Another big difference I have experienced: we used to literally celebrate server uptime (I mean as a celebration, I have a distinct memory of gathering around an IBM "fridge" to celebrate the uptime birthday of a particular RS/6000) while now a piece of infra with too much uptime is a red flag about potential vulnerabilities. What does largely remain the same, I think, are the skills needed to be good at this. Then, and now, we need people who don't mind reading manuals, searching online (this was already a thing when I started, I guess you'd have to go back to the mid 90s for this to not be the case?) , who can keep track of where they've been during a debugging/troubleshooting session, that sort of thing. Another thing that changed is that in the past some people considered it a badge of honor to be assholes to others not in sysadmin, even more to others not in IT (remember those "select * from users where clue > 0" t-shirts, or the BOFH stories?), while now that's typically frowned upon and quite a few companies are explicit about a no assholes policy in their hiring material (or perhaps I've just been lucky with my teammates and smarter when picking where to work at than when I was younger).