>"Are you sure that's what sysadmins themselves do?" By my standard yes, that's what they do. Of course, I expect there are a whole host of common definitions

>"Are you sure that's what sysadmins themselves do?" By my standard yes, that's what they do. Of course, I expect there are a whole host of common definitions and countless pet ones. >"In practice, the "sysadmin" seems to be "that guy who does all the stuff that we don't know how to automate." I would call that person an operator or technician with the amount of manual work and a sort of single-threaded skillset being defining characteristics. >"The people who do the automation--if it's repeatable, instead of per-site one-off stuff--are just called developers. E.g., the Docker developers, or the Erlang developers." I can't claim to have met many people who are called or would call themselves developers who have the breadth of knowledge in the layers below the interpreter or compiler to manage or automate across many dissimilar systems. I imagine this is depends on the environment though, the younger, more homogeneous and closer the company product is to the technology they employ the more likely I'd expect what I would consider developers able to handle those matters. When a company gets older, more segmented and the business functions further from the technologies I could see the role being more that of a sysadmin.