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idk, I'm not a software engineer. I'm a sysadmin. Or, am I a "devops engineer"? or.. a "SRE"... or... am I a platform engineer? You know what, I don't know.

by dijit 1y ago

idk, I'm not a software engineer. I'm a sysadmin. Or, am I a "devops engineer"? or.. a "SRE"... or... am I a platform engineer? You know what, I don't know. What I do know, is that people keep trying to make my job obsolete, only to hire me under a different title for more money later. The practices and the tools are the same too, yet to justify it to themselves they'll make shit up about how the work is "actually, a material difference from what came before" (except, it's really not). I'm still employable after 20 years of this. I'm not a software engineer, and I'm not a tech CEO - I don't care, but people have been trying to replace me my whole career (even myself: "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all). Yet, somehow, I'm still here.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
kshacker 1y ago
Same here, but this time is different. Truly. Some of the easy jobs will be taken away and your job is not under threat. Right? But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Less supply more demand. Either the pay will come down or there are very few jobs. Fingers crossed.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Yes, and this is not shocking. This is how it is meant to work. You get a low level job because you're new and have a lot to learn. You learn more things as you work the low level job, and then you can get promoted or move to a new role that is not so low level. You keep growing until you eventually compete with the people that were senior level when you were working that low level job.
- dijit 1y ago
  It always feels like “this time its different”. NoOps, NoSQL, Heroku, PaaS, IaaS. Maybe there are less people in operations than before, there are certainly some companies that do their best not to employ any operations focused people and use FaaS for everything and only hire feature developers… who, end up doing the operations work that crops up. shrug
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > Maybe there are less people in operations than before Even that ended up not being true, and I'd argue we have even more people doing ops now than we did before all the buzzwords. Going to change my job title to cockroach because no matter how many times companies and trends have tried to kill ops, I'm still around, and sometimes in larger numbers.
dylan604 1y ago
> "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all Not just sysadmin. I've been automating the hell out of tedious mundane tasks that are done by error prone humans, and only become more error prone as they get tired/bored of these mundane tasks. The automation essentially just becomes a new tool/app for the humans to use. At this point of my experience doing this, employees scared of automation are probably employees that aren't very good at their job. Employees that embrace this type of automation are the ones that tend to be much better at their job.
- vrighter 1y ago
  I try to once in a while but, for example, last time I ended up being instructed to make a bunch of changes to make the automated tool make all the little mistakes that were usually done during the manual process, so that if the process needs to be done manually, they wouldn't be confused. For example: Setting up a volume of a particular size, and then, so they wouldn't have to bust out a calculator, they put in a nice round number that's nice for them to write (lots of zeros), meaning it wastes space. The point of the automated tool is to do it quicker and correctly, and remove the need for a calculator (which just involves dividing one number by 4096 at some point, really). But I had to re-fuck-it, and as a bonus, they never used it at all. I doubt any of my colleagues remembers it exists.
benlivengood 1y ago
If you're like me, though, your day-to-day has probably shifted a lot. My day used to be making sure desktops worked and we had a repeatable process to make new good desktops out of all the complex client software they needed. Then I made sure servers got upgraded and patched and taken care of on a day-to-day level, although it was still someone else's job to keep desktops running. At home I compiled my own kernels and used tarballs to install and update packages. Desktop hardware support was iffy in Linux. Then I jumped to borg and tupperware and kubernetes where hardware never mattered and it almost didn't matter what clients had because the browser they used auto-updated. At home I switched to distros where package management was automatic and rarely, if ever, broke. I don't even know the hostnames or the network addresses of the hardware that runs my services, and AWS or GCP SREs probably rarely need to know either. Now I care about an abstract thing called a service that is instrumented with logs, metrics, and traces that would put the best local development tools of 20 years ago to shame. CI/CD and infrastructure as code pipelines actually did automate away many of the checklist-style sysadmin work of the past. At home I could run Talos and Ceph and Crossplane if I wanted to but so far I've dragged the old days of individual hosts along mostly for nostalgia. I expect to eventually end up caring about systems at an even more abstract level once something like Crossplane becomes as universal as Terraform and GitHub actions. They'll probably run on something like web assembly on bare metal because no one actually cares what's underneath their containers if they keep working. The stack of technology gets taller and more abstract and as it does so the job of caring about the lower layers gets automated and the lower layers get, if not simplified, standardized to the point that automation is more reliable than human intervention. Humans will only get squeezed out of the loop when superhuman artificial intelligence arrives and our abstract design and management of systems becomes less reliable than the automation. Then hopefully we get a nice friendly button to push for more automatically-human-aligned utility. EDIT: That's not to say that the lower levels can be automatically designed; not yet at least. Eventually once AI is good enough at formal design then quite likely. We still need low-level software engineering to keep building the stack but it is vastly more commoditized (the one open source developer in the xkcd cartoon keeping 99% of the world's infrastructure running on a 20-year old tool/utility)
Exoristos 1y ago
Each generation of young workers seems to need to learn for themselves that the class warfare is endless, and mundane.
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  Very helpful insight, thank you!
petethepig 1y ago
Many jobs aim to solve problems so well that there’s nothing left to fix — doctors curing illnesses, firefighters preventing fires, police reducing crime, pest control eliminating infestations, or electricians making lasting repairs. And that’s totally fine — people still have jobs, and when it works, it’s actually great for everyone.
- lovich 1y ago
  > when it works That’s a load bearing phrase
oooyay 1y ago
I really loath that part of this industry; I spent over a decade in it and the only tangible thing I've taken away from it is that the problems these philosophies and practices set out to solve are derivative of two things: - Infrastructure is very often fundamentally disconnected from the product roadmap and thus is under constant cycles of cost control - The culture of systems administration does not respond well to change or evolution. This is a function that is built around shepherding systems - whether at scale or as pets. Long way of saying the gamut isn't that corporations will ever be free of systems administration any more than they'll be freed from software engineering. It is far easier to optimize software than it is to optimize infrastructure though, which is why it feels like someone is coming after you. To make matters more complex, a lot of software today overlaps with the definition of infrastructure.
righthand 1y ago
Thank you for this, not only on the Ai-related discussion but painting the sense that sys admin work is still as complex and finnicky as it ever was. All we did with that role is let Amazon evangelize some weird taxing “standard” for hosting.

by dijit 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

kshacker 1y ago

Same here, but this time is different. Truly. Some of the easy jobs will be taken away and your job is not under threat. Right? But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Less supply more demand. Either the pay will come down or there are very few jobs. Fingers crossed.

dylan604 1y ago
> But some of the people who were doing low skilled jobs will grow to compete with you. Yes, and this is not shocking. This is how it is meant to work. You get a low level job because you're new and have a lot to learn. You learn more things as you work the low level job, and then you can get promoted or move to a new role that is not so low level. You keep growing until you eventually compete with the people that were senior level when you were working that low level job.
dijit 1y ago
It always feels like “this time its different”. NoOps, NoSQL, Heroku, PaaS, IaaS. Maybe there are less people in operations than before, there are certainly some companies that do their best not to employ any operations focused people and use FaaS for everything and only hire feature developers… who, end up doing the operations work that crops up. shrug
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > Maybe there are less people in operations than before Even that ended up not being true, and I'd argue we have even more people doing ops now than we did before all the buzzwords. Going to change my job title to cockroach because no matter how many times companies and trends have tried to kill ops, I'm still around, and sometimes in larger numbers.

dylan604 1y ago

> "Automate yourself out of a job” is a common sysadmin mantra after all Not just sysadmin. I've been automating the hell out of tedious mundane tasks that are done by error prone humans, and only become more error prone as they get tired/bored of these mundane tasks. The automation essentially just becomes a new tool/app for the humans to use. At this point of my experience doing this, employees scared of automation are probably employees that aren't very good at their job. Employees that embrace this type of automation are the ones that tend to be much better at their job.

vrighter 1y ago
I try to once in a while but, for example, last time I ended up being instructed to make a bunch of changes to make the automated tool make all the little mistakes that were usually done during the manual process, so that if the process needs to be done manually, they wouldn't be confused. For example: Setting up a volume of a particular size, and then, so they wouldn't have to bust out a calculator, they put in a nice round number that's nice for them to write (lots of zeros), meaning it wastes space. The point of the automated tool is to do it quicker and correctly, and remove the need for a calculator (which just involves dividing one number by 4096 at some point, really). But I had to re-fuck-it, and as a bonus, they never used it at all. I doubt any of my colleagues remembers it exists.

benlivengood 1y ago

If you're like me, though, your day-to-day has probably shifted a lot. My day used to be making sure desktops worked and we had a repeatable process to make new good desktops out of all the complex client software they needed. Then I made sure servers got upgraded and patched and taken care of on a day-to-day level, although it was still someone else's job to keep desktops running. At home I compiled my own kernels and used tarballs to install and update packages. Desktop hardware support was iffy in Linux. Then I jumped to borg and tupperware and kubernetes where hardware never mattered and it almost didn't matter what clients had because the browser they used auto-updated. At home I switched to distros where package management was automatic and rarely, if ever, broke. I don't even know the hostnames or the network addresses of the hardware that runs my services, and AWS or GCP SREs probably rarely need to know either. Now I care about an abstract thing called a service that is instrumented with logs, metrics, and traces that would put the best local development tools of 20 years ago to shame. CI/CD and infrastructure as code pipelines actually did automate away many of the checklist-style sysadmin work of the past. At home I could run Talos and Ceph and Crossplane if I wanted to but so far I've dragged the old days of individual hosts along mostly for nostalgia. I expect to eventually end up caring about systems at an even more abstract level once something like Crossplane becomes as universal as Terraform and GitHub actions. They'll probably run on something like web assembly on bare metal because no one actually cares what's underneath their containers if they keep working. The stack of technology gets taller and more abstract and as it does so the job of caring about the lower layers gets automated and the lower layers get, if not simplified, standardized to the point that automation is more reliable than human intervention. Humans will only get squeezed out of the loop when superhuman artificial intelligence arrives and our abstract design and management of systems becomes less reliable than the automation. Then hopefully we get a nice friendly button to push for more automatically-human-aligned utility. EDIT: That's not to say that the lower levels can be automatically designed; not yet at least. Eventually once AI is good enough at formal design then quite likely. We still need low-level software engineering to keep building the stack but it is vastly more commoditized (the one open source developer in the xkcd cartoon keeping 99% of the world's infrastructure running on a 20-year old tool/utility)

Exoristos 1y ago

Each generation of young workers seems to need to learn for themselves that the class warfare is endless, and mundane.

mattgreenrocks 1y ago
Very helpful insight, thank you!

petethepig 1y ago

Many jobs aim to solve problems so well that there’s nothing left to fix — doctors curing illnesses, firefighters preventing fires, police reducing crime, pest control eliminating infestations, or electricians making lasting repairs. And that’s totally fine — people still have jobs, and when it works, it’s actually great for everyone.

lovich 1y ago
> when it works That’s a load bearing phrase

oooyay 1y ago

I really loath that part of this industry; I spent over a decade in it and the only tangible thing I've taken away from it is that the problems these philosophies and practices set out to solve are derivative of two things: - Infrastructure is very often fundamentally disconnected from the product roadmap and thus is under constant cycles of cost control - The culture of systems administration does not respond well to change or evolution. This is a function that is built around shepherding systems - whether at scale or as pets. Long way of saying the gamut isn't that corporations will ever be free of systems administration any more than they'll be freed from software engineering. It is far easier to optimize software than it is to optimize infrastructure though, which is why it feels like someone is coming after you. To make matters more complex, a lot of software today overlaps with the definition of infrastructure.

righthand 1y ago

Thank you for this, not only on the Ai-related discussion but painting the sense that sys admin work is still as complex and finnicky as it ever was. All we did with that role is let Amazon evangelize some weird taxing “standard” for hosting.