there's old timers and there's ye olde thymers. The big shift was the web/.com boom. In the period before the mid 90s when high end workstations were why groups

there's old timers and there's ye olde thymers. The big shift was the web/.com boom. In the period before the mid 90s when high end workstations were why groups of people ran unix, sysadmins were frequently more experienced systems programmers who knew a lot about the internals and why Chesterton's various fences had been built, and they did sysadmin because nobody else could be trusted. With the interwebs there became a massive need for many many servers, and an attendant need for many many sysadmins, and their training/experience would be purely administration, with more need to glean more information from guides. In that same time period, use of computers shifted to more personal computers, so the demand for datacenters was from a lot of Windows9x boxes (that needed administration and didn't get any). And then the shift to WindowsNT and then AMD64, so who was "coming up" and how much they knew of systems programming kept declining. Now we've started to adminster administration, with a lot of files in /etc that say "automatically generated, don't edit this" Evi Nemeth's books were feeding the internet growth, not the real old time sysadmin's.