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There's that but there's also this: > However, after heading over to Y Combinator to check out startup jobs, I was again frustrated by the findings. YC Jobs ha

There's that but there's also this: > However, after heading over to Y Combinator to check out startup jobs, I was again frustrated by the findings. YC Jobs has a category for Engineering, but it's all software. There's a category for Operations, but it's all CEO, CTO, management positions. After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines. How on earth are all these startups operating without a network person? You don't have someone running your server or your VPN? These "operational" jobs where people manage servers without engineering knowledge are much rarer today. Most people run their services on cloud, you need ops people that can code and do engineering as well, the people that used to cable and connect servers are not as important anymore, as the market moves more and more towards cloud or managed providers. If i was the OP i would start thinking seriously about pivoting careers to a devops kinda job instead, where they will find many more options. The "tinkerer" network jobs just aren't that available anymore, it has been heavily abstracted away and the little work that there is the engineers will do as well.

zelphirkalt 2y ago
Startups are too cheap to pay for someone running a proper VPN. Some rather buy some proprietary appliance and call it a day, even, if it ruins workflows of employees for years. (source: experienced this)
- shortrounddev2 2y ago
  Yeah I've only worked for one company that had a dedicated Network guy, and his work was being phased out as we moved everything towards AWS. Eventually the only work to do at the company was managing security for the company wifi network
sanderjd 2y ago
I think there are still a fairly significant number of these jobs, but they just aren't at small companies, because you can get extremely far without even one person doing it full time. Like, into the thousands of employees in most cases, I think? Certainly into the hundreds. So I think this role just isn't very compatible with startup job boards, specifically.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  Even at large companies you see less of that, I don't think it's a particularly bright career path right now.
tguvot 2y ago
those "operational" jobs exists today. just not in the small startups, that still didn't figure out, that despite running in the cloud you need networking and cybersecurity people
- shortrounddev2 2y ago
  The longer my career goes on, the less a lot of these cloud services make sense to me. I know why we have AWS deploy our production instances, but why are all of our staging and dev instances running on EC2? Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that? Sure it might be slow, but it's not meant to handle 100k QPS, it's just for QA
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.
    - shortrounddev2 2y ago
      I think if you had a whole server rack, you might have to hire someone for that, but if you're just running one or two servers with containers to run your dev builds, you could get that set up on K8s and manage your deployments the way you would with AWS. I don't think it would require hiring new people, an existing devops guy should be able to do that
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        It's still additional operational overhead for marginal RoI. If you're an organization that already has a SRE or Infra Eng hired, there's no point supporting a niche setup when every other team is using a prebuilt and troubleshooted environment. Edit: Can't reply to OP atm, but he makes a good point. For a higher margins and less commodified segment like ML Compute, on-prem computing still makes financial sense. That said, that's still managed by actual SWEs not a generic Sysadmin, due to intricacies of GPU Architecture and Model Development, and OP is extremely underskilled for this role.
alephnerd 2y ago
> I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines OP has actually fallen behind skills wise. This is why companies have been moving Cloud First - your DevOps/SRE or even your Dev team can also be your Networking and Security team. The writing was on the wall for Network Engineers and old school Sysadmins almost a decade ago, and why so many transitioned into becoming Infra, DevOps, SRE, or Security SWEs or joining Security and Cloud companies as Sales or Support Engineers. Edit: OP seems technical enough (assuming they know how the difference between Podman vs CRI-O, how to code a DFS from scratch, and what Netlink is), but isn't selling their skills right. They need to invest better and think about how to better tailor a resume. Not having a LinkedIn is also career suicide at this point.
- betaby 2y ago
  > Not having a LinkedIn is also career suicide at this point. Not a single job I worked I got from LinkedIn. LinkedIn seems to be spam-only site to me. Thus not sure about that.
  - LeonenTheDK 2y ago
    I wonder how much it matters been just having a LinkedIn account vs actually and actively using it. IE not having a presence on the platform ends up as a negative for whatever reason.
umvi 2y ago
> After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines. How on earth are all these startups operating without a network person? You don't have someone running your server or your VPN? For smaller companies the answer is: "VPN admin is just one of many hats that a given generalist might wear" It would be very costly to pay a FTE just for that one thing, it wouldn't make economical sense until the company reached a certain size and could afford a dedicated IT dept.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > a given generalist might wear That generalist is your SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineer in most cases. This is why companies try to be increasingly cloud first - you can have 1 person do 3 jobs at once.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    In very early stage startups you won't even have one dedicated SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineer, you'll have a few Software Engineers who wear the DevOps hat as needed. Even once you get a little bit bigger, I lean towards having a few generalists who wear more hats over breaking out a hat and putting it on a team of one.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  Yep, more cloud native companies don't need a dedicated network guy. How do I get networks and VPN? I declare them in Terraform and they pop out the other end. Done, no weird Cisco CLI commands required.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
The two places I've worked with dedicated networking people have both been relatively small non-tech businesses. In one case a third-party logistics company and in the other a manufacturer. Roughly a few hundred people in both cases. Just pointing out that these places exist but openings are rare and often not paying competitive salaries. I agree that a career pivot to "devops" or "site-reliability engineer" would probably be the way to go for a networking person of yesterday to make a competitive salary today while retaining the relevance of their expertise. (Of course, if the salary is less important, there you go!)
hn_version_0023 2y ago
“the people that used to cable and connect servers are not as important anymore” What an arrogant take. As someone who does this, and is also a self-taught, no-degree-having troglodyte, I am forced to completely disagree. Your cloud servers are built by people. That you don’t value those people says WAY more about you than anything else. I understand the abstraction— but that isn’t gonna matter when the PDUs are offline or the fibers get cut. Tinkerers still exist and still get hired. Just not at FAANG. There is an entire world outside FAANG.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  You're free do disagree, doesn't change the reality that most infrastructure will be running on monopolized data centers that need less and less people to operate. I'm not devaluing anyone here, just stating that, as running infrastructure becomes a more and more concentrated business, there will be less jobs because the small shops/ISPs/data centers are disappearing, and what will be left will be the large cloud providers and equinixes out there.
- caymanjim 2y ago
  They're all centralized now, though. It used to be that every medium-to-large business needed in-house networking expertise and ran their own small data centers, or at least ran a server room that required a couple full-time people to manage. Now everything is cloud-hosted, and those kinds of jobs have all but vanished, unless you work at your regional AWS data center. Offices don't even need simple cable runs and switches/routers anymore. A basic consumer-level network connection and ISP-provided WiFi AP are all the vast majority of businesses need. Everyone has a laptop and there's nothing to plug in or manage.
lolinder 2y ago
> thinking seriously about pivoting careers to a devops kinda job instead I wouldn't even necessarily consider this a career pivot, it's just a matter of them embracing the evolution of their field. Most of the other "network people" saw the writing on the wall years ago and re-titled themselves and got whatever new training and certifications were needed to use the new tools. They're a bit late to the game, but they can take the same path that tens if not hundreds of thousands have already taken.
silverquiet 2y ago
I think the key is being a generalist who can take on whatever systems the place uses. I think that no matter what, you still need someone who knows how all the pieces fit together and can troubleshoot it when it breaks. Obviously I'm a bit biased since that's how I see myself. I do actually still rack a server now and again and set up a switch or a firewall or whatever is needed that day, but it's not something that takes up much of my time. That stuff is pretty mature so it just doesn't need a lot of attention even for companies like mine who still have some on-prem gear as well as cloud.
lamp_book 2y ago
I think the cloud's impact on the hiring market is steeply underrated from what I've seen in the discussions. More business seems (to me, anyway) to be ran by cobbling together these services rather than developing technology in house. Unfortunately this devalues more general skills like networking, security, DBA, SWE, etc. for proprietary stack specializations.
oooyay 2y ago
Somewhat of a cynical take, but a lot of programs called DevOps and SRE are actually the same old ops people armed with some scripts and better BI tooling. It's rare to find definitional SWEs in these spaces and when you do you should cling to them. Even then, it's hard to resist the urge to revert back to ops because toil is somewhat addicting to companies.
- hadlock 2y ago
  From what I can tell, there's very little value in putting a SWE into an ops role, regardless if it's SRE. The open source (CNCF in particular) tooling is really good these days. Hiring an SWE for ops results in them building a bunch of custom tooling that needs to be thrown out when they leave.
  - oooyay 2y ago
    I couldn't disagree more. The tooling that is Kubernetes was written by SWEs in ops roles and there's many more examples like that. Much of the CNCF donated tooling wouldn't exist without SWEs in ops roles.
dsr_ 2y ago
"These "operational" jobs where people manage servers without engineering knowledge are much rarer today" They never existed.

zelphirkalt 2y ago

Startups are too cheap to pay for someone running a proper VPN. Some rather buy some proprietary appliance and call it a day, even, if it ruins workflows of employees for years. (source: experienced this)

shortrounddev2 2y ago
Yeah I've only worked for one company that had a dedicated Network guy, and his work was being phased out as we moved everything towards AWS. Eventually the only work to do at the company was managing security for the company wifi network

sanderjd 2y ago

I think there are still a fairly significant number of these jobs, but they just aren't at small companies, because you can get extremely far without even one person doing it full time. Like, into the thousands of employees in most cases, I think? Certainly into the hundreds. So I think this role just isn't very compatible with startup job boards, specifically.

mlinhares 2y ago
Even at large companies you see less of that, I don't think it's a particularly bright career path right now.

tguvot 2y ago

those "operational" jobs exists today. just not in the small startups, that still didn't figure out, that despite running in the cloud you need networking and cybersecurity people

shortrounddev2 2y ago
The longer my career goes on, the less a lot of these cloud services make sense to me. I know why we have AWS deploy our production instances, but why are all of our staging and dev instances running on EC2? Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that? Sure it might be slow, but it's not meant to handle 100k QPS, it's just for QA
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.
  - shortrounddev2 2y ago
    I think if you had a whole server rack, you might have to hire someone for that, but if you're just running one or two servers with containers to run your dev builds, you could get that set up on K8s and manage your deployments the way you would with AWS. I don't think it would require hiring new people, an existing devops guy should be able to do that
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      It's still additional operational overhead for marginal RoI. If you're an organization that already has a SRE or Infra Eng hired, there's no point supporting a niche setup when every other team is using a prebuilt and troubleshooted environment. Edit: Can't reply to OP atm, but he makes a good point. For a higher margins and less commodified segment like ML Compute, on-prem computing still makes financial sense. That said, that's still managed by actual SWEs not a generic Sysadmin, due to intricacies of GPU Architecture and Model Development, and OP is extremely underskilled for this role.

alephnerd 2y ago

> I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines OP has actually fallen behind skills wise. This is why companies have been moving Cloud First - your DevOps/SRE or even your Dev team can also be your Networking and Security team. The writing was on the wall for Network Engineers and old school Sysadmins almost a decade ago, and why so many transitioned into becoming Infra, DevOps, SRE, or Security SWEs or joining Security and Cloud companies as Sales or Support Engineers. Edit: OP seems technical enough (assuming they know how the difference between Podman vs CRI-O, how to code a DFS from scratch, and what Netlink is), but isn't selling their skills right. They need to invest better and think about how to better tailor a resume. Not having a LinkedIn is also career suicide at this point.

betaby 2y ago
> Not having a LinkedIn is also career suicide at this point. Not a single job I worked I got from LinkedIn. LinkedIn seems to be spam-only site to me. Thus not sure about that.
- LeonenTheDK 2y ago
  I wonder how much it matters been just having a LinkedIn account vs actually and actively using it. IE not having a presence on the platform ends up as a negative for whatever reason.

umvi 2y ago

> After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines. How on earth are all these startups operating without a network person? You don't have someone running your server or your VPN? For smaller companies the answer is: "VPN admin is just one of many hats that a given generalist might wear" It would be very costly to pay a FTE just for that one thing, it wouldn't make economical sense until the company reached a certain size and could afford a dedicated IT dept.

alephnerd 2y ago
> a given generalist might wear That generalist is your SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineer in most cases. This is why companies try to be increasingly cloud first - you can have 1 person do 3 jobs at once.
- lolinder 2y ago
  In very early stage startups you won't even have one dedicated SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineer, you'll have a few Software Engineers who wear the DevOps hat as needed. Even once you get a little bit bigger, I lean towards having a few generalists who wear more hats over breaking out a hat and putting it on a team of one.
stackskipton 2y ago
Yep, more cloud native companies don't need a dedicated network guy. How do I get networks and VPN? I declare them in Terraform and they pop out the other end. Done, no weird Cisco CLI commands required.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago

The two places I've worked with dedicated networking people have both been relatively small non-tech businesses. In one case a third-party logistics company and in the other a manufacturer. Roughly a few hundred people in both cases. Just pointing out that these places exist but openings are rare and often not paying competitive salaries. I agree that a career pivot to "devops" or "site-reliability engineer" would probably be the way to go for a networking person of yesterday to make a competitive salary today while retaining the relevance of their expertise. (Of course, if the salary is less important, there you go!)

hn_version_0023 2y ago

“the people that used to cable and connect servers are not as important anymore” What an arrogant take. As someone who does this, and is also a self-taught, no-degree-having troglodyte, I am forced to completely disagree. Your cloud servers are built by people. That you don’t value those people says WAY more about you than anything else. I understand the abstraction— but that isn’t gonna matter when the PDUs are offline or the fibers get cut. Tinkerers still exist and still get hired. Just not at FAANG. There is an entire world outside FAANG.

mlinhares 2y ago
You're free do disagree, doesn't change the reality that most infrastructure will be running on monopolized data centers that need less and less people to operate. I'm not devaluing anyone here, just stating that, as running infrastructure becomes a more and more concentrated business, there will be less jobs because the small shops/ISPs/data centers are disappearing, and what will be left will be the large cloud providers and equinixes out there.
caymanjim 2y ago
They're all centralized now, though. It used to be that every medium-to-large business needed in-house networking expertise and ran their own small data centers, or at least ran a server room that required a couple full-time people to manage. Now everything is cloud-hosted, and those kinds of jobs have all but vanished, unless you work at your regional AWS data center. Offices don't even need simple cable runs and switches/routers anymore. A basic consumer-level network connection and ISP-provided WiFi AP are all the vast majority of businesses need. Everyone has a laptop and there's nothing to plug in or manage.

lolinder 2y ago

> thinking seriously about pivoting careers to a devops kinda job instead I wouldn't even necessarily consider this a career pivot, it's just a matter of them embracing the evolution of their field. Most of the other "network people" saw the writing on the wall years ago and re-titled themselves and got whatever new training and certifications were needed to use the new tools. They're a bit late to the game, but they can take the same path that tens if not hundreds of thousands have already taken.

silverquiet 2y ago

I think the key is being a generalist who can take on whatever systems the place uses. I think that no matter what, you still need someone who knows how all the pieces fit together and can troubleshoot it when it breaks. Obviously I'm a bit biased since that's how I see myself. I do actually still rack a server now and again and set up a switch or a firewall or whatever is needed that day, but it's not something that takes up much of my time. That stuff is pretty mature so it just doesn't need a lot of attention even for companies like mine who still have some on-prem gear as well as cloud.

lamp_book 2y ago

I think the cloud's impact on the hiring market is steeply underrated from what I've seen in the discussions. More business seems (to me, anyway) to be ran by cobbling together these services rather than developing technology in house. Unfortunately this devalues more general skills like networking, security, DBA, SWE, etc. for proprietary stack specializations.

oooyay 2y ago

Somewhat of a cynical take, but a lot of programs called DevOps and SRE are actually the same old ops people armed with some scripts and better BI tooling. It's rare to find definitional SWEs in these spaces and when you do you should cling to them. Even then, it's hard to resist the urge to revert back to ops because toil is somewhat addicting to companies.

hadlock 2y ago
From what I can tell, there's very little value in putting a SWE into an ops role, regardless if it's SRE. The open source (CNCF in particular) tooling is really good these days. Hiring an SWE for ops results in them building a bunch of custom tooling that needs to be thrown out when they leave.
- oooyay 2y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. The tooling that is Kubernetes was written by SWEs in ops roles and there's many more examples like that. Much of the CNCF donated tooling wouldn't exist without SWEs in ops roles.

dsr_ 2y ago

"These "operational" jobs where people manage servers without engineering knowledge are much rarer today" They never existed.