4 ms·
There is a lot of focus on programmers , which is absolutely fine: they are usually the "makers". However I wonder why admins get overlooked. Just like the plum
by spydum 14y ago
There is a lot of focus on programmers , which is absolutely fine: they are usually the "makers". However I wonder why admins get overlooked. Just like the plumber or the electrician, sys/net admins are the handyman/tradesmen of the computing world, and as software deployments grow, so will their demand.
- recuter 14y agoI'm sure a great admin is worth their weight in gold for an org with a headcount of 10,000. I'm not so sure for an org of 10. I think, and I could well be wrong, that the trend for successful companies is towards the latter. None of this is to say the field is bad or will go away any time soon, just food for thought.
- sjg007 14y agoOne admin for 10 programmers is a huge multiplier. That admin can take care of the non programming needs so that the devs have more time to focus on code than context switching to handle the crap.
- munin 14y agoadmins are going to be replaced by programs that software engineers write (consider devops, heroku, aws, etc).
- spydum 14y agoAll of those services are run by sysadmins using software, not by software themselves. They just moved up a level of abstraction (take a look at the SRE listings, places are crowded with trying to hire proper devops/SRE). They have become the utility, which is where my plumbing/eletrician analogy comes in. You might argue this is just suggesting there is a greater demand for software engineers, and that may be true, but I would be very skeptical of someone saying sysadmins would be replaced. Why haven't we replaced plumbers/electricians? Clearly we have utilities/plumbing/wiring that has been deployed for decades with little to no maintenance? Yet the profession still exists. The reality is, it still takes these tradesmen to build new environments, and support the frequent changes that technology throws us.
- BobWarfield 14y agoNooooo. They are being managed by software. Facebook has 1 admin per 1000 MySQL instances. You can't do that except with software. If the DevOps guy is spending much time touching servers, you got the wrong guy. I've been through this multiple times. In each case, I hired a good Devops guy and told him to work his way out of a job ASAP. Typically, he was down to spending 1/3 of his time on ops of any kind, including DevOps, within 6 months. At that stage I had him helping Prof Svcs, QA, and the Developers by directly writing product code.
- gems 14y agoThe sys admins I've known have generally been some of the most technical people I've met. They talk to vendors, know a lot about hardware, and have a great understanding about unix/ linux. They're not just administering your infrastructure, but also troubleshooting really low level things. How exactly is 'troubleshooting' going to be replaced by programs?
- philwelch 14y agoAny sysadmin worth his salt today is a devops. Go to Heroku or AWS and you'll find lots of job listings for system engineers. It's true that we'll be able to get more done with fewer sysadmins, but that doesn't mean we'll have fewer sysadmins. The Jevons paradox suggests we might even have more sysadmins.
- georgemcbay 14y agosoftware engineers are going to be replaced by programs that software engineers write, it is just going to take longer.