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Cloud was a nice promise that was broken all too quickly. This is why cloud repatriation is a growing trend, that and a growingly brittle cloud with outages tha

Cloud was a nice promise that was broken all too quickly. This is why cloud repatriation is a growing trend, that and a growingly brittle cloud with outages that are outside anyone's control, and the costs unmanageable. There are also business sectors where they never could fully go cloud-only because of regulatory. Bio-pharma for example. > the role of System Administrator was practically eliminated. You don't have an SA just exclusively work on infrastructure, you do have them as generalists that know your environment and systems, and can have them quickly troubleshoot, modify, and resolve UB issues and outages when something breaks on Sunday night on Christmas Eve, or have the DR required equipment on-site to ensure generators are up right after Hurricane Sandy passes, and pre-emptively handle issues before they become outright disasters. Anyone thinking you can have helpdesk do this isn't right in the head. > I think LLMs have absolutely nothing to do with this. There are a growing number of places that get lock-in contracts where the SA related services they offer are being done by helpdesk staff manning LLM based chatbots without disclosure, blindly. This obviously works right up until it doesn't, and by the time people notice the fundamental issue, the competent people the company needs won't be around anymore with a vicious race to the bottom. These helpdesk people may be manning 3 or more chatbots simultaneously in a foreign country while pulling in the same as retail fast food in California. No SA can compete with nominally free slave labor, and these people don't care about Information Governance and unauthorized data disclosures. Any seasoned SA worth their salt will be capable of automation in python and powershell at a fairly advanced level if they're MS centric, and python/bash for Linux. DevOps Engineer, Architect, SRE all have quite a lot of overlap with a competent SAs, but SAs aren't getting these jobs. There's no path to getting those jobs, and the actual stats and hiring being done seems to indicate there aren't many people getting these positions, and they are almost universally grey beards. No one going in, no one coming out, what happens when they die/age out/flame out... The related IT systems fail in growingly chaotic trends, and related production grinds to a halt. It becomes just like the ending of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, but without the new beginning. LLMs aren't a substitute for people, but companies are using them as such, and there is an increasing body of literature showing that LLM use increases cognitive debt. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872)

mancerayder 1y ago
>There are a growing number of places that get lock-in contracts where the SA related services they offer are being done by helpdesk staff manning LLM based chatbots without disclosure, blindly. >This obviously works right up until it doesn't, and by the time people notice the fundamental issue, the competent people the company needs won't be around anymore with a vicious race to the bottom. Future contracting opportunities for us?
- trod1234 1y ago
  Sure, but only if you are still in the business and can communicate with those people, but there's so much interference by the point of time that this happens that everything is paralyzed. The price tag must still make that worthwhile too, something that hasn't been reflected in reality so far. If you made 70-80k in 2020, you would need to at least be making 90-100k today just keeping pace with purchasing power/inflation. Instead you have companies low balling people with decades of experience at 50k on top of that 25% loss in purchasing power since 2020, so your only making 37.5k in 2020 dollars. The math simply doesn't pan out, and that's not taking into account the higher tax rates either. If you've been searching for work, have the experience, and there have been zero opportunities, for a significant period of time, the competent people change careers and move on, cutting their losses on what amounts to a bad investment. The only people remaining in the pool being the barely competent, and cost increasing. This sieves until no one remains because of those factors leaving the sector voluntarily or involuntarily. You do have to be able to put bread on the table after all. Also its a technical field, there is a natural level of skill atrophy if you aren't actively using your knowledge and skills everyday because of no demand. You still have them just because you use them even when you aren't working, but its not quite as quick. The problem is when you hit that critical point, where there are no opportunities despite a competent specialized skillset, and great need but no demand because the problems are a problem for next quarter to the point no effective reaction can occur from management. This leads to collapse. It happens in labor multiplier fields first (IT) which then touches everything else. Its not business as usual, its the fall after a three generation boom cycle finally hitting bust. The praxis inherent in the profession then become lost knowledge along with other doom spirals.

mancerayder 1y ago

>There are a growing number of places that get lock-in contracts where the SA related services they offer are being done by helpdesk staff manning LLM based chatbots without disclosure, blindly. >This obviously works right up until it doesn't, and by the time people notice the fundamental issue, the competent people the company needs won't be around anymore with a vicious race to the bottom. Future contracting opportunities for us?

trod1234 1y ago
Sure, but only if you are still in the business and can communicate with those people, but there's so much interference by the point of time that this happens that everything is paralyzed. The price tag must still make that worthwhile too, something that hasn't been reflected in reality so far. If you made 70-80k in 2020, you would need to at least be making 90-100k today just keeping pace with purchasing power/inflation. Instead you have companies low balling people with decades of experience at 50k on top of that 25% loss in purchasing power since 2020, so your only making 37.5k in 2020 dollars. The math simply doesn't pan out, and that's not taking into account the higher tax rates either. If you've been searching for work, have the experience, and there have been zero opportunities, for a significant period of time, the competent people change careers and move on, cutting their losses on what amounts to a bad investment. The only people remaining in the pool being the barely competent, and cost increasing. This sieves until no one remains because of those factors leaving the sector voluntarily or involuntarily. You do have to be able to put bread on the table after all. Also its a technical field, there is a natural level of skill atrophy if you aren't actively using your knowledge and skills everyday because of no demand. You still have them just because you use them even when you aren't working, but its not quite as quick. The problem is when you hit that critical point, where there are no opportunities despite a competent specialized skillset, and great need but no demand because the problems are a problem for next quarter to the point no effective reaction can occur from management. This leads to collapse. It happens in labor multiplier fields first (IT) which then touches everything else. Its not business as usual, its the fall after a three generation boom cycle finally hitting bust. The praxis inherent in the profession then become lost knowledge along with other doom spirals.