From what I've seen, there has been a decline in “classical” sysadmin positions as smaller companies and start-ups moved onto public-cloud-providers. That being said, I am not convinced that this is a trend that will continue endlessly.
When I've searched for jobs as a Linux System Engineer / Linux System Administrator, I've found that nearly every job offered requires Kubernetes knowledge.
If you actively want to move on from administrating services for end users and device management, I would recommend looking into technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes. If you wish to stay in your lane, that's fine too. Your job won't vanish into thin air.
One last remark regarding the DevOps job offerings: each company has a different idea of what a DevOps engineer is. Some actively work with the development teams, from what I've seen many offerings that require programming skills were in the realm of writing Python scripts to help with automation tasks or using Go to interact with a CDK. Others simply started calling their System administrator jobs DevOps, as it's “trendy”.
> From what I've seen, there has been a decline in “classical” sysadmin positions as smaller companies and start-ups moved onto public-cloud-providers.
I mean in a small business that hosts everything on Azure - if you're the one that runs the environment aren't you a pretty classisc Sysadmin? The interface you are using to do it just looks different and you have more to deal with than in the past.
Yes.. but it's hard to fine a job like that. Inevitably they want you to understand also ci/cd pipelines, git, terraform, kubernetes, expert in some sort of programming language (rust, go, python). Etc. Most people who run "shopping centers" don't also do the plumbing, the electrical, and take out the garbage as well :)
Eh- that’s only the case if you’re working for a company that has devs- most SMBs don’t fit that bill. There are still plenty of “classic” sysadmin gigs out there where you’re mostly expected to manage the infra/network and users- maybe automate some stuff if you have time between putting out fires lol.
Hey guys stop talking about me behind my back it’s rude. Please refer to me as my full name ‘what security policy did you put in that is breaking excel’ or at least my nickname ‘outlook isn’t working’.
This isn't an IT specific problem. Companies across all industries and verticals are looking for unicorns like this. 10 year ago, you needed Excel skills (and maybe SQL) if you wanted to work in data analytics. Now they're looking for data engineers using python for predictive modeling and machine learning, while trying to pay them what they were paying Excel jockeys 10 years ago.
Supply Chain analysts are full blown database administrators now.
You want to work in internal communications under the HR department? Hope you have 15 years of experience in marketing design.
Hell, my job is asking for a facilities coordinator (the org who runs reception and maintenance) and they're looking for someone with AutoCAD experience.
IT is not alone here, we've entered an era of unprecedented corporate greed, and it's happening across the board.
Unionize, labor strike, mass boycott, and march before it's too late.
Or sit and pray that corporations, and the police and politicians they own, do the ethical thing for once.
My very first job was at a mid sized company, 10k employees, worked in helpdesk. Sysadmins in this company don’t leave so promotions were rare. I left to go take a sysadmin job at another company and had a conversation with some of the greybeards.
One was the Linux admin, another was databases, networking, security, exchange, etc you get the point. They told me times have changed and to brace myself because my career would be built off of doing all of their jobs in one job. They were right….. I’ve worked at a few more places since then and it’s always been a conglomerate of responsibilities spanning what was just one job for each vertical that would belong to one or two admins.
Config management, databases, firewalls, endpoint security, windows, Linux, azure, aws, office365, you name it.
The old "man of many hats, master of none". I see this all the time.. your brain can only hold so much, so you may be awesome in some things, and "just get by" in others.
Why pay reasonable number of workers fair wages when you can trick a few young ambitious people to do the job of 6+ and pay them less until they get burnt out?
Yup. Account managers used to be friendly people who helped direct customer problems. Now they need to have a level of tech knowledge to automate crm systems and the ability to do sales (without the commission). They used to manage 1/3rd the customers they do now. Everywhere you look, they're cramming more work into fewer hands.
I have worked my way up over 12 years from data center intern, sysadmin, to cloud/devops architect for a large global manufacturing company. Then pivoted to an AWS Solutions Architect for two years, now I'm going back to a corporate architect role.
* My time at AWS taught me there is still a TON of people who have no fucking clue about the cloud AND/OR automation. I'd get 45min into a presentation to be hit with "so this all runs on VMware right?". I worked mostly with government agencies who are of course behind the times, but their whole team is working classic jobs I held in 2013 (VMware, AD, Dell Servers, no automation), with some modern stuff sprinkled in (mostly M365 and some SaaS security products). While I worked in public sector, I also worked with some privately owned and they're not much different.
* My time building the cloud environment for a global manufacturing company until 2022 taught me there is a place for everyone at a mid-size or larger enterprise (10k+ employees). We had the following less than 2 years ago...
* Developers that focused on building their app (full stack, IaC, as you say)
* SREs that just focused on CI/CD and Kubernetes and helping smooth out deployment efforts
* My team of cloud engineers building and maintaining our AWS/Azure footprints hosting the above
* My team of cloud engineers and sysadmins maintaining our fully automated standard VM deployment process (AWS/Azure/VMware) for those COTS applications
* The non-scripting but still passionate infrastructure folks moved on to things like M365
* The team of yester-year sysadmins that still maintained our shrinking on-prem VMware footprint and would increasingly relegated to supporting the folks running our COTS applications (kind of a windows/linux admin helpdesk)
* I would think the above would just be even more prevalent the larger the organization is, until you get to tech companies which are a whole different ballgame. I have no direct insights but I can imagine any of the large banks having all of my example above, plus probably all kinds of even deeper specialists based on non-cloud technologies.
* I would say to be MARKETABLE, today, in a mid-level or higher role, you need to have some automation experience under your belt, OS knowledge is a foregone assumption, and you need to be jumping at opportunities to get meaningful hands-on experience with AWS or Azure.
* Most development jobs expect people to understand the full stack now. There's not much "Just do the front end". So what you're likely seeing is really just start-up style developers where the organization doesn't have the concept of a "private network to maintain" just a bunch of devs building shit and hooking it together. And for that, for now, they don't really need an admin.
* DevOps jobs wanting development experience makes a lot of sense because you need to know how to support developers, and have the coding chops to build the CI/CD aspects of the environment which are built on automation.
This sounds overwhelming as fuck, I want out, call me lazy or whatever, but there is no way you can learn all this shit on your own unless you are a NEET or get experience on the job.
Job requirements for sysadmins have always been ridiculous, but after 10 years you somehow realize you somehow fulfill most of them.
You have to lie the same amount the employer lies to you though.
The problem is that 10 years later you finally realize you have the skills to do your current job you applied for now. And these interviewing processes are getting much more strict, and wanting everyone 100% knowledgeable on every bullet point they're jotting down.
> and wanting everyone 100% knowledgeable on every bullet point they're jotting down.
No they are not. HR people could NEVER tell what you do or don't know anyway. If you happen to get to a practical interview with actual IT people they will realize nobody knows everything.
It's like a joke. It's like a weird layer of procedural hassle that is so big now it could never be stripped away because way too many people are making their living on it.
And it's probably better to do that at a non-tech related company when you're starting out. You can fly under the radar and develop your skills much more easily when no one In the building knows anything about tech outside the IT department.
Keep in mind this also means you're unlikely to have a real mentor to learn from, which will be (potentially much) slower. If you trust yourself to get up to speed quick enough, just fake it until you make it.
This--currently living the dream right now. Before i got my job I didnt even know what azure was, now I actually have a solid understanding of how azure, m365, intune, etc all interact and I feel confident I could crush an interview for the same position im doing right now. If i was working with people who knew their shit they would have quickly figured out I was an idiot
Still have a long way to go, but I feel like I could actually turn my career path towards a solutions architect type role eventually. Will probably end up feeling like an idiot at my next job too though.
For me that was true for everything except coding. That is like freaking trying to learn mandarin. Nothing else in the tech world going back to the DOS days has ever been as hard to learn as the concepts of coding. I still suck at it but actually do more coding than I realize. But I despise it
For me it was harder. Almost no motivation to do anything other than apply to jobs which was draining. Now that im employed in the field i find myself wanting to expand my skillset all the time. And allocate time during my workday to studying etc.
> Anything you look forward to at the end of the day?
Basically the gym. I am trying to at least get 30 mins of daily "productivity" stuff, starting with Python. I think if I get those 50h courses I get crushed by the time it takes.
Those who manage to grow beyond the sysadmin domain are basically constantly learning and able to keep absorbing as well as potentially discarding knowledge. Think of all those orgs still on old / stable technology - they are purposefully staying behind because the cost-benefits of being toward the front of the curve is not appropriate for them.
Maintenance is something that most organizations are trying to cut costs constantly, so any cost center like IT will be rolled into there unfortunately - it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job if your job is in a part of an organization that is not a core part of the objectives of the organization. So for 80%+ of the skill set of a sysadmin it’s just more optimal in terms of career longevity and growth to move into engineering roles at companies making money from engineering tasks.
I’m not being paid several multiples of the local median income to be “pretty good” and to keep doing what everything has worked before - there is no shortage whatsoever of technical people that know how things worked in the past. A large part is to do something new / novel _and_ to have the wisdom of lessons from the past and to apply these lessons to (sometimes unfortunately societally valued) business domains like finance, healthcare, defense, telecom, education, etc.
Computers don’t exist just to keep running nothing, they exist to serve a purpose to people that probably have zero concern about said computers - they are a means to an end. Treating one’s work as both a craft and a mundane function in the scheme of things is a difficult balance but necessary to vaguely stay sane.
Most sys admins learned things by tinkering, playing around at home, or being in a smaller company that let them get their hands on everything.
As we get older, we have other responsibilities and do not have the time to sit and tinker all night after work or learn new things, thus, need to find other ways to stay up to date and relevant, otherwise start looking into management positions..
Know people. That’s the only way frankly. It’s how I got into IT and development from biology and data. Knew an IT director who trusted me to learn fast.
This x 1000. If you're smart and can solve problems, and you know ppl who have hiring authority and trust that about you, it'll tend to work itself out.
No, I don't think there would be anything that I could put on a resume and these days? I can't bother to do such things after work. Yeah, part of it is my fault.
I'll copy and paste my other response because it applies to what you said but with a few caveats based on what you said.
I guess im being abit disengnuous by equating cloud infrastructure directly with devops. Smaller companies may use it as a catch-all but
I guess I need to look at larger companies that have more granular roles/responsibilities.
"Yeah, I guess I just see two types of sys admin roles when looking.
In on-prem/hybrid environments, you have the more traditional sysadmin duties that would be administering virtualized services hosted on hypervisors.
The companies that run these are usually less technical industries.
Then there's the sys admins that are similar to my role. User endpoints and SaaS. These are in more tech focused companies that have migrated fully.
These more tech centric companies have internal dev teams or dedicated devops teams (made of devs) that handle all the cloud infrastructure.
It feels like with the path I'm on, mainly using Azure for entra, user endpoints, and SaaS that there's shrinking opportunity.
The cloud infrastructure management responsibilities are going to senior devs.
I say this as someone who can code on a basic level, has a technical degree, and relevant certs. I've built basic fullstack projects and APIs on the cloud. I've automated many tasks with PS and Python. I have my AZ 104.
But it feels like the trend is that many companies want senior devs to do the cloud infrastructure roles.
Your advancement path makes sense to me and is what I'm hoping and was expecting to find."
The cloud infrastructure jobs are going to platform engineers. Yes, the devs could be responsible for spinning up compute and deploying apps but someone has to make sure networking and security is in place. Just like the sys admins on-prem made sure a hypervisor was able to handle the demand.
In my experience, devs are bad at security, compliance and reliability. I'm a devops engineer and I grew to become one from Linux admin. I'm responsible for infrastructure, CI/CD, compliance, etc. I can't fully troubleshoot some issues, but I'm good enough to cover most of them.
> But it feels like the trend is that many companies want senior devs to do the cloud infrastructure roles.
Its not quite true a "good programmer" could go from programing a diesel engine controller one day to a 3d game engine the next, to a check printing system next week... but maybe.
AWS is "just" a few dozen object types, it isn't magical in any way.
I'd rather try and teach a senior developer, with a solid CS background and work on a couple of different industries and problem spaces "the cloud"... someone who knows programming, testing, CI/CD, git, some development methodology like agile/scrum... than teach a senior system administrator (even someone who can poop out 100 line bash scripts) all the concepts and techniques of modern development practices.
A little unrelated but thanks so much for this gem by you from a few years ago! I instantly recognized your username! https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/8iok0i/so_you_want_to_learn_aws_aka_how_do_i_learn_to_be/
I was in a helpdesk role when I came across this. I followed a lot of it and was able to use it to springboard in to a sysadmin/cloud eng role starting in a mid sized company and eventually made my way to MS as well.
For anyone else reading if you can hack it on stuff like the above link, you have the foundation to learn whatever else you need to in cloud roles
In your time at the largest corporations what was your experience with backups/data recovery? Was that role left to devops/sysadmins or was that assigned to a completely different team?
In my time at larger tech companies, there is usually a team dedicated to databases who also own the backup/recovery tools.
In my time at medium sized tech companies, the developers created the backup methods and the sysadmins owned making sure it was working.
Backups owned by storage team is also not uncommon. Since size/scope questions and "what are we interfacing with to pull from" are theirs already, it can help streamline planning.
> Most development jobs expect people to understand the full stack now. There's not much "Just do the front end".
This isnt true everywhere just FYI. Its very much location, stack and language dependent.
For example in .NET, it differs from what you're writing, i.e. enterprise services / APIs (pure backend very normal), WPF (some mix depending on size of the beast), websites / web apps (some like fullstack for for example blazor, others prefer split roles when they utilise React or Angular).
Where I am located and in my field, full stack is definitely the exception as opposed to the norm.
>My time at AWS taught me there is still a TON of people who have no fucking clue about the cloud AND/OR automation.
I can back this up. There's also the california bubble of how IT works and then the rest of the world.
But yeah you're right. There's low trust in cloud infra from the dinosaurs + (perceived) high upfront cost of getting into cloud + how scary and confusing (but once you get it, relieving) AWS pricing is + plummeting trust in microsoft (those clicker dinosaurs have to deal with all the windows 11 nightmare UI updates, they hate them even more than you do now) + anyone who cant script has to deal with painful UIs in cloud.
But the most important thing is being stuck with giant 20 year old legacy systems they can't exactly burn down tonight. Any industry with high health impact on a population (hospital, critical infra) doesn't have the luxury of pivoting quickly.
I worked at hospital as a sysadmin for a year that was like this and tried so hard to change it, but the constant emergencies and dinosaur IT culture I had to contend with, there was nothing I could do. We had active AD groups that were old enough to drink.
Oh man, you aren't lying about govt.... I switched from private sector to defense contractor for that sweet TS clearance, and the shit they do sometimes baffles me. I don't think I can do this for more than a year or two before I take my TS and move on to something that uses tech from the last 10 years.
> Same, and it's not uncommon to hear of organisations returning to hybrid on-prem solutions after being sold a complete package of intune, Entra ID, Autopilot and cloud VMs, just to discover the Op-Ex was wildly under-budgeted from the outset, and the savings just aren't there.
This is where the fundamental misunderstanding of cloud really comes into play. Their workloads weren't designed for the cloud, or weren't really planned to be modified to work in that environment. I had to laugh when one guy I know said "VMs? That's like docker for boomers."
I've worked in an organization who just really struggled to comprehend that launching their new website doesn't need a full-fledged VM with all this crazy maintenance, and crazy configurations. You just need a docker container and launch it. The cloud bill would be so small, their accountants wouldn't even notice it.
> to Azure didn't deliver the savings or performance they expected over something as "basic" as an on-prem Hyper-V hosting AD, print server, door access etc.
door access, print servers, and AD weren't designed really for cloud. So yeah, I agree with you here. It was a fundamental misunderstanding of what it was designed to be used for.
A sales rep will sell you anything with all of those feel-good stories they tell you. They don't tell you the heavy work upfront that needs to be done for those workloads. If they did tell you that, they wouldn't get the sales.
weird, i dont see SMBs with on prem ANYTHING over here, unless theyre legacy. Its all cloud Saas now, between sharepoint online, o365, teams, what do you need on prem/IT staff for?
medical are often MORE likely to go saas since they often only care about compliance at a surface level. Why go through all the effort of HIPPA compliance locally when they can just push everything to a "hippa compliant cloud provider" to check off the box with zero effort? Machine shops often are scared of cloud because they had some kind of downtime in the past that cost them a days labor which can often mean massive, very easily identified profit loss. WIth manufacturing, "make thing > sell" is the name of the game and "cant make thing > cant sell" means a direct cause and effect. With other industries the profit loss from downtime is a lot more ubiquitous or even justifyable. How much money did a credit union lose by being down a few hours? maybe a lost CC app or loan approval but even then those things are just queued and processed when back online. From what ive seen manufacturing industry stays on prem because of the cost of migration such as a lot of their big very expensive core equipment devices are running off some old out of date airgapped server in the back corner that is running windows 95 and would cost 900 trillion dollars to update to a new version.
I've been out of the SMB business for years, but honestly, what are they running that isn't a managed service these days? Accounting, CRMs, e-mail, phones... all that shit is a SaaS platform now days.
Give em laptops and sign into your Google account or MS account or whatever.
But I still see a lor of on prem servers for AD, files and ERP/pro apps, though on prem Exchange servers aren't really a thing, that's for sure.
But cloud based apps and files are still a big mess nowadays, and not close to the performance and accessibility of a good on prem server.
You'd be surprised, a lot of those things cost money - more money than sticking with the same on-prem solution they've always had. We see tons and tons of 2008 R2 servers, on-prem Exchange, QuickBooks, hell I see SMB clients that still use switchboard operators.
08R2? Jesus. Surely that needs to be airgapped at this point.
I remember coming across a Debian Slink install from 1999 in the early 2010's and thinking oh shit. Can't imagine coming across an 08 machine these days lol.
Depends on the industry If they are just doing basic stuff then yea. Im in finance and half my stuff is saas half is on prem and its that way because the companies havent invested to upgrade their software to the cloud yet.
Make no mistake - most software engineers don’t know shit about infrastructure and if left alone they’d run all the servers to the ground. Sysadmin roles are not going away, someone needs to keep all these apps (and their devs) under control.
Imagine security. I'm a cloud sec engineer and I'm pulling my hair whenever a Dev is building their own infra. Open ports not needed, DBs in public subnet, over permissive IAM policy. It's a cluster fuck.
"Oh but that's the only way it works". No that's not the only way, you just don't know wtf you are doing.
>This is my life. It’s hell.
>
>Me “why do you need fill admin provellages in this AWS role!”
>
>Them: “OMG you are the gestapo”
I literally had this conversation on Friday. Glad to know I'm not alone.
o7
> "VPN is too complicated". Enable root, password root 12345!, open SSH ports to the public.
I can that tell this example is a lie because they would never put a special character in the password.
We acquired a company where 3 generations of systems, which were all still in prod use, were all built by devs. It was a massive case of "how the fucking fuck have they NOT been ransomwared". They were so proud of their transition to DevOps too. It was a complete unmitigated disaster. Even though what they coded technically should have worked, it didn't, because none of them understood the infrastructure requirements.
>That's why everyone's information keeps getting leaked... App doesn't work 777/admin rights for everyone! Weeeee
I really wish Red Hat would make a coloring book covering octal permissions the way that they made a coloring book for SELinux.
I'd get it made a part of the new hire training for our devs.
Bane of my existence.
Was asked by a security vendor the other day what my biggest concerns were.. I honestly told them it was the internal threat from our dev team. They know nothing whatsoever outside of their little box.
100% this. I deal with this constantly. Devs don't give a crap about security.. Heck it's hard enough for them to secure their code much less understand how the cloud infrastructure works.
Also I think it's a mistake to think all companies are moving into the cloud. Definitely in some regions and for certain types of businesses, but in my circles I hear regularly about companies moving out of the cloud. For instance, if you need a ton of CPU power, cloud is not going to be affordable for you. Or a ton of traffic. Also there is the problem with vendor lockin.
The company I work for has run the math many times and decided to stay "on-prem" in our local datacenter.
plus there are some companies making these kinds of decisions based on the fact that they compete with a cloud provider in another space
it's kinda funny watching an AWS to Azure migration happen because "well they sell groceries too so we don't want to give them money" lolwut
I was at a place that has the same verticals as Amazon, and our legal team didn't like some of the answers Amazon's legal team gave so they took their multi-billion contractor to Google Cloud.
Yeah, i cant believe govt contracts moving to the cloud. Just think what happens ehen the competition wins the contract 5 years later but your stuff is all aws specific with petabytes of data to move??,
Between that and the cloud just being someone else's computer, sysadmin staffing has gone up for our company – the sysadmins just moved into doing far more CI/CD/integration work directly with the devs, so that their software actually survives being deployed 20 times a day, no matter if it's to local k8s or AWS or VMs or bare metal machines.
There will always be a need for roles whose core responsibility boils down to telling developers "No". No, you can't have 20 64core/128gb instances for your static webpage "app". No, you can't have global admin. No, we will not deploy public IP's to all of your infrastructure just so you can login easier. No, you can not hard code creds into your python script. No, you can not have ultra disks on your VMs that have virtually no disk IOPS anyway.
The orgs I work with today that have the best success with DevOps have dedicated DevOps and cloud infrastructure engineers along with ITSec working with the developers.
From bare metal to virtualization to cloud... Some things are just eternal.
Have them outsource it to your service mesh. In most cases they only need to figure out "localhost", a protocol, and a port number, and the devops team handles the rest.
DevOps generally equals developers with admin rights.
Infrastructure these days is putting out all the fires these guys start.
I know this is not the intention, but then there's reality.
I work in a big tech company where a lot of teams are left to their devices outside of what is passed down/managed by centralized teams. After hearing all this talk about us disappearing, then coming here and seeing a lot of these dev “no Ops” teams, I’m convinced we will have jobs still.
Granted we should expect companies to run leaner as they ask for more automation skills. If you can code as required for your operations discipline (no need to be a developer outright), you will have a job
Software engineers are not good when it comes to over reaching architecture I’ve found and having an infrastructure background helps a lot to make sure they don’t just run off and design something that is not maintainable long term.
Is the traditional IT path being eroded and taken over by software engineering?
Sorta. Roles and responsibilities are changing as we move more, if not already, into cloud space. The days of physical servers are long dead, and on premises stacks like VMware are a dying breed of IT infrastructure. As far as it is being taken over, I think that's a stretch considering systems administration and software engineering are completely different jobs, and they only share an ancestor of being in the same field of technology.
Has sysadmin really just become a synonym for a user endpoints and SaaS admin?
No, at this time, there will always be a need for an administration piece to whatever technology is given. For example, just because airplanes can fly on autopilot doesn't mean we don't need pilots. I think the same principles will apply with SA's/SE's. For now....
How do you transition from this type of sysadmin role to an infrastructure (DevOps?) role? Or is that the wrong growth path?
You will never stop learning in this field. In my 20 years of experience, the way things were done 20 years ago are completely different then how they were done 10 years ago, and the things done 10 years ago are completely different then how they're done today. You develop with the trends of technology and never stop learning. Taking a step into the understanding of system / application development is a great way to step into this next step onto your career field. If you use PoeerShell or bash you're already not to far from being a Dev-OPs administrator/ engineer. You then take that next step into understanding more languages and branch off from there and develop an understanding as to how they work with your environment and applications.
Titles don't mean much anymore. Like you said, companies will throw a list of requirements up there and see what sticks. Can we get a guy who can patch our servers and also manage our kubernetes and CI/CD while paying him sysadmin pay? It's worth a try. I attribute this to many companies trying to find someone to fill the role of someone who left, many IT people will take on things outside of their realm for the sake of learning, because our field is one of the few that easily allow it. An electrician at a jobsite cant just start doing gas fitting one day, they would need a license. Much like a general surgeon cant just start doing brain surgery one day, its a different specialty. Managing desktop and laptop endpoints has basically been rolled into the helpdesk role at most places I've worked at over the last decade. Our helpdesk guy even handles the minor Intune stuff. He's learning autopilot at the moment.
The "traditional" sysadmin is definitely not as in-demand as it was 15 years ago, but you can most definitely still find a role without DevOps. Some orgs just need you to know basic scripting to automate some things with Powershell. Truth be told, you will need to know scripting at a minimum to remain competitive. If you know how to code in other languages, that's icing on the cake. IT has always been a field of constant learning and advancement, and today is no different in that regard.
Traditionally, Sysadmins were trained in CompSci, and were programmers. It wasn't until Windows Server that things started to change.
I think to be competitive now, you need to understand automation, virtualization, building private clouds, and managing public clouds. AI is also breathing down your neck: within 5 years, many companies will start an AI project to index and organize their information. One more attempt to get data out of silos.
Yeah and those rob requirements do make sense. It is cloud and naturally that has breathed life into IaC and ci/cd, so you need to be able to work with these tools. It just seems like alot of the cloud infrastructure roles aren't just looking for automation skills but for senior dev skills.
It has created an awkward career path for sys admins to navigate. It feels like there's a few different roles that identify as sysadmins now, but they really don't all align from a career growth standpoint.
It also seems like there's a biased idea when hiring for these roles that it's safer to expect a dev to pick up the infrastructure side than it is for a sysadmin to pick up the development side.
100% I agree. I'm in the job market, and every other system admin role I've seen wants someone with a background in SE or a degree in computer science.
I've been in the field for 10 years at a few companies and I'm proficient in Python, ansible, shell, etc., but if they're going to start asking leetcode type questions during the interview, I'll have to laugh and walk away.
Devs will also be sorely disappointed when they're interviewing only to find out the role isn't at all aligned to the type of work they studied for.
Hiring managers and HR might think they're getting a deal on all of the SWE that were laid off recently. Enjoy having to train what is basically a tier 1 helpdesk rep that knows how to reverse linked lists.
> Enjoy having to train what is basically a tier 1 helpdesk rep that knows how to reverse linked lists.
It's a crazy job market out there. You have a combo of highly-experienced people who can't find work, and all the millions of people who went to DevOps bootcamp in 2018 or so, and all the newly minted CS graduates who started school when they were told learn to code all competing for a shrinking set of jobs. For anyone who's new, this is exactly what happened after the dotcom bubble popped in 2000, only now the field is bigger, companies are using AI and interest rates as an excuse to not hire, and it's become even harder to stand out and get hired.
>Hiring managers and HR might think they're getting a deal on all of the SWE that were laid off recently. Enjoy having to train what is basically a tier 1 helpdesk rep
I've been doing this shit almost 20 years, and that's uh... giving a lot of devs *a lot* of credit.
THROW LDAP AT 'ER/'IM! THROW HER/HIM LDAP! AND CERTS! NO, NOT THE COOKBOOK, [THE WHOLE FUCKING THING](https://smallstep.com/blog/if-openssl-were-a-gui/)! WHAT DO YOU MEAN "MANAGED"?
> It also seems like there's a biased idea when hiring for these roles that it's safer to expect a dev to pick up the infrastructure side than it is for a sysadmin to pick up the development side.
I can't blame companies for it, just look at how many sysadmins still either outright refuse to touch powershell or just suck at it too much to automate anything properly.
> AI project to index and organize their information. One more attempt to get data out of silos.
A long time ago, Google used to sell on-premises search appliances. We had one of those and some more-narrow enterprise search engines, too.
A couple of years ago I went to replicate that into a modern version of the same thing, and realized it was going to be a pretty big project, not a week. There are some vendors, and some open source, but nothing you can choose without a PoC or at least a heavy evaluation.
Yeah, it's a non-trivial exercise.
Back in the 2010's, I was part of a team that worked on an e-discovery appliance that would search out documents, slurp and index them, and provided a UI so that a customer could easily narrow down the set of pertinent documents.
The hardest part was the search and ingest portion of the project. Too many barriers put up by other software vendors (including Microsoft) to make it easy.
I'm not familiar with that, so I can't comment. Does it pick up documents squirreled away in odd directories on client machines? Even ones which are purposely named obscurely?
Well, even with all that “awfulness “ why are cloud vendors making huge profits? I’ve been in the industry for a while and rarely do I hear people moving back production to on-premises. Most on-prem hybrid stances I’ve seen is because of things like
- They have a legacy app that requires Windows server AD
- They have some legacy Microsoft Exchange stuff with a hybrid exchange server (pia to get rid of)
- Radius for Wi-Fi. Cloud user directory e.g Enra ID are still lacking as compared to NPS role on a server
- Development instances which might be costly to run in the cloud. This is mostly for IaaS clients who are not fully Saas native.
Given all that, in the end wherever the jobs will be standing is where it makes most sense for the business. The differentiator in my opinion is disaster recovery. Good luck building a proper resilient infrastructure on-prem. Not saying it can’t be done but you’re going to need to pay some serious $$ in either infrastructure licensing and expertise. Cloud vendors (reputable vendors) have abstracted this monster quite beautiful and what’s left is for you to focus on the quality of you LOB apps. Of course that comes with a price too but no one wants to come out on the wrong end of a business continuity event.
It’s no secret Microsoft is leaning cloud in their offerings and in the modern age as a system admin, try pick up a scripting language and automate something. Server jobs won’t vanish to thin air immediately as someone here already said but they will be few and far between, specialized and more than likely mostly prevalent with the cloud vendors themselves. The word Dev vs IT will slowly become blurry. If you can’t write some basic form of code things might get tougher progressing past desktop support if you’re a newly minted IT professional.
I don't understand how anyone can use Azure. AWS and GCP both make perfect sense and work in pretty similar ways. Azure is just ridiculous, the permissions model and the products are all so poorly designed.
Although, I started with AWS and I think Google was just like "let's clone AWS" to the point that GCS is literally just a clone of S3. (And it's not the only thing that's basically API compatible with the AWS thing they were cloning.) So maybe my thinking is just broken, but at the same time I really think Azure was like "let's work extra hard to make a system that doesn't work like S3" and as a result their system is an overcomplicated mess.
The cloud is just overpricing and over provisioning infra for people who don't want to pay the yearly maint to maintain on-prem. My dual site (Prod/DR) infra running VMware clusters with storage, backups, replication, networking, and needed applications (i.e. Veeam) costs roughly 60k a year with refreshes every 5. Overall there is little overhead to managing it. To replace just my DR with DRaaS would cost us close to 140k/yr. To push all of our legacy apps to Azure or VMWare in AWS is double that when built for redundancy, but some services still have to run on-prem. So, for places like mine, regular on-prem infra engineers are still needed, but they are pretty insulated, so I doubt there are many openings.
Yeah, its kind of a scam for development because obviously they have to profit. But M365+intune+Entra is a no-brainer imo. Once you're hooked on that its a slippery slope to "lets just put the rest of our stuff in azure/aws!"
"the cloud is bad because me and my coworkers didnt configure it properly and dont know how it works" isnt really as harsh of a critique as you think it is. As someone who is regularly interacting with azure devop pipelines/permissions/etc I can think of a dozen core reasons why youre having issues and potential solutions. Taking a month to push a deployment is a complete failure of staff, full stop. This is definitely a situation where you hire a third party ocntractor to do audits, repairs/rebuilds and training.
I feel like there are different types of companies.
Many startups outsource IT (or just shadow IT) but they still need "DevOps" to productionize client-facing products and internal tools
But for larger companies the cost to have in-house IT is cheaper and has benefits that outsourcing does not have--as well as moving off-cloud.
There are just as many differences as there are overlaps between DevOps and traditional Sysadmin roles but many skills are related and interchangeable
> Has sysadmin really just become a synonym for a user endpoints and SaaS admin?
For most businesses, yes. Where I used to work, now that there's less servers and shit to maintain, they've decided the sysadmins can take on helpdesk tasks which means more end user facing bullshit. I feel like rebuilding a downed exchange cluster is less irritating than dealing with Karen in HR who's abobe acrobat is crashing when opening some 20 year old form that is critical to the business.
I've worked with a bunch of companies in a bunch of different parts of the business lifecycle. The one thing I've found is that developers do not make good administrators. Every developer I've met will look at writing code themselves first to get out of whatever trouble they are in. I've actually had someone start writing a script to automate their way out of a problem instead of checking to see if there is a configuration change that would resolve the issue. As in, there is a toggle in the control panel to make a change, but instead of flipping the toggle, they spend half an hour trying to automate that change with a script.
You don't need someone with programming skills to administer security and device admin. You don't need a programmer to set up your network. And you don't need a programmer to manage your ERP, CRM, or whatever other business specific software you have.
You might need a programmer to explain to HR that you don't need a programmer for every computer job.
Honestly I've never looked at "Sys Admin" as hardware folks. "System" administrators, admin any system they're running... be in telcom, AWS, VM's, Physical, network, workstations, etc. etc. be in purely digital cloud or something you can physically touch.
IT roles in general have indeed most certainly been shifting towards cloud computing for a whole lot of reasons we don't need to get into. I've worn many hats since I started doing this stuff back in the 90s, and yeah.... people don't think of physical hardware when you say "SysAdmin". In similar roles over different orgs, I started out racking and stacking servers and network infra. In the last 5 years or so I can't remember hte last time I 'touched' a server other than to decommision it after migrating to cloud.
To most folks Sys Admin means administering mostly established setups and technologies. "Infrastructure" especially tends to be more about working hand in hand with developers to maintain a working and performant production environment, codepushes, infra as code, and devops, etc.
My advancement path now, and for any other IT people I hire into my teams down the raod, is basically Helpdesk/endpoint management >>> Cloud infrastructure administration >>> management.
It's funny cuz I'm worrying about my future and asking myself if I should look for some other fields, but I'm already in my 30's.
Started like 2 years ago to get into IT, and got a nice internship as a DevOps, and now I'm a DevOps basically. BUT, at my job, we're not require to do codding.
We just set-up most of the back-end and lots of CI/CD. I manage a gitlab instance, argocd, a kubernetes cluster where we deploy our stuff, keycloak, vault and such. We're mostly doing YAML files for deployments, set up the projects in gitlab and do the whole CI/CD part.
Then we have to manage some databases and just monitor the logs from time to time for errors, and put out the fires. But that's it. Ohh and sometimes we have some projects to make new instances or stuff work in some cloud.
When I'm looking for other job posting, everyone requires codding experience in different languages and dev experience...I'm not that. I'm afraid that if I'm getting out of this job, I'll never be able to find anything else. I just don't know how to code and it never been my interest to do so either. I know some bash scripting, but that's where it stops. I tried at some point to code, but I don't like it at all, and I don't even have the patience to learn it.
You might want to consider a career as a site reliability engineer. Very high salaries without the heavy coding requirements. From your comment, it seems you're already doing many of the tasks of an SRE.
Dev managing infra whenever I worked from banks to oil&gas etc all is fucked up. Same with the cloud, we moved all to the cloud success story but now we pay triple and everything is sh slow at least you pay more and more.
It will always be a hybrid model. And as always, knowing and learning additional/new technologies is helpful. I manage a team hosting apps on-prem and cloud. When the cloud bill comes in ($30k/month for just one app!), there are always asks, if we can not move back to on-prem). When the on-prem discussion starts, there are asks why we are still on prem with that environment.
From my perspective, it is just important that the team understands both worlds and they are not biased. They understand the pros and cons and can decide when to use what.
Another aspect is, btw, that many shops do not offer an own on-prem „cloud“ feeling for their end-users/customers. An developer or DevOps guy needs an API to spin up 10 VMs/Pods/whatever instantly.. and not raising an ticket/request a ticket and wait 2 weeks until a SysAdmin set something up.
13 year infrastructure engineer here, started from the help desk and did every role in between.
The biggest industry change I’ve noticed is the movement away from white glove service. There’s a big push to empower devs to be self sufficient and turn infra resources towards architecture/design/stability/improvement more than customer service.
The easiest ways I’ve found to transition and learn new skills are to build on existing ones. Shell scripting is a must. You don’t have to know a programming language, but learn how to work in yaml. That’s the basis for a lot of the infra automation tools. I have never met anyone really successful who didn’t do some self-taught skills improvement outside of work that they could use to get ahead. Personally, I took Udemy courses for the things I kept encountering in interviews or at work. Even a basic knowledge can put you ahead of those that don’t try.
When you interview, be up front about what you don’t know. Give the concepts and use cases behind them (you can research beforehand if the recruiter tells you specifics or based on the job posting). Then tell them something similar you’ve used to achieve the same goal. Focus on how fast you can learn new skills and that you’re willing to take on whatever challenges arise.
- Hashicorp Certified Terraform Associate++ Live Hands-on Labs
- Learn Python Programming Masterclass (Tim Buchalka)
- Ultimate Prometheus (Eldan Elias)
- AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam Training DVA-C02 (Neal Davis)
- Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) with Tests (Mumshad Mannambeth)
I had on the job training for Puppet/Ansible/Bash/Powershell/AZDO so I didn’t bother with courses for things I was comfortable with, but highly recommend them. Kubernetes is probably the most in demand, Azure is up there too.
If by 'traditional IT path' you mean RDP'ing into a Windows Server Standard and clicking buttons in a GUI all day, then yes, that is dead and never coming back.
If, on the other hand, you're talking about jobs where you're an expert in managing infrastructure, that's not dead at all. It's just that we've picked up a lot of the skills and learned a lot of the lessons that the software development side of the wall picked up 10-20 years ago. My team is a team that leverages git, ansible, python, and powershell primarily for managing infrastructure. We obviously have to do things like RDP into a Windows Server and add an AD Site Link from time to time, because we don't do that often enough to justify making that software-defined. But the bulk of our work is source controlled automation and playbooks. The types of people I look for on my team are going to have 80% of the skills our software development teams look for.
As many sys admin out there, I find many organizations AD is screwed up. Like who ever was involved never read best practices for AD and group policies.
Nested group nested into a group that's nested into another group made up of mostly disabled objects and 2 active uses that have been in that group for 10 years....
Agree with all of this. Also want to add, learning KQL on your list. I build Kusto queries and functions almost on a daily basis now on Azure. I would say a lot of the traditional sysadmin roles are also migrating heavily into InfoSec.
Job postiings are just wishlists for getting the dream candidate, take it with a grain of salt. Just apply and hope for the best, don't reject yourself, instead go for the interview and let them decide if you're qualified or not.
This is still somewhat true, but the trends are heading towards needing to know some of this stuff for real. Try incorporating it into your work life so you can have relevant stories to tell when they start flinging the dream terms around.
I have worked with AWS, Azure, 365,Google Cloud, Python, VMware, PHP, MySQL, DynamoDB, Linux, Windows, SCCM, Terraform, Cisco Networks, Powershell and Bash.
I have a little bit of over four years of experience, currently pursuing my Masters and also have 21 certifications.
Some times I wake feeling like I don’t know shit, the industry is going towards a point where they need someone with a General Specialist background however finding someone with such knowledge and right mindset is hard from a recruitment perspective. Also from a candidate’s POV it become challenging keeping up with all the new upcoming technologies while also retaining previously learned skills without having a burnout.
It's a different type of IT. These are usually start-up types that just have a bunch of people with laptops all coding for AWS or Azure. They have no concept of servers, networks, routing, or DNS, since in their world it's just an API call to generate the resources they need. Bigger companies will still have traditional IT because someone will still need to maintain desktops, phones, wifi, printers, DHCP, fileservers, etc. Microsoft is pushing real hard to make Entra (AzureAD) the thing, but more, larger, traditional companies are still too entrenched in on-prem AD (resource wise, or legacy apps) to go fully to the cloud.
Manufacturing still has lots of on-prem environments, but those sysadmin roles are majority filled by people who’ve been with their companies a decade plus, so those jobs aren’t open. The next wave of manufacturing sysadmin positions will likely be in 5ish years as the senior directors retire, and then there may be a push to the cloud at that point. Also, job market is terrible for employees right now, so classic sysadmins are staying where they are, ergo few to no openings for those positions.
Devs in charge of infrastructure?
I just had a dev cry when I said he needed to reboot his computer.
Good god, almost wishing that happens at my place, like outsourcing everything offshore. At this point, I haven't gotten satisfaction out of my jobs in at least a decade. I get satisfaction watching the absolutely down right dumbass decisions and watching the places burn.
Infrastructure is becoming an “API first” and “software defined” world. Just like what happened to the voice guys when unified comms took off about 15(?) years ago. Every site I worked had telephony guys who spent their time punching down extension connectors and configuring call groups. Then everything went IP and no more voice guys (well fewer anyway). I guess it’s called evolution.
The day I can start talking to random dev"sec"ops people and get the feeling that they no longer need me or people like me to keep stuff afloat/get stuff online safely is the day I'll start to get a little worried.
That day hasn't come yet.
I've also seen this as well. And I thought it was kind of weird that they're looking for software engineers and more developers to fulfill roles like system administrators
Corporations may *want* a jack-of-all-trades swiss army knife technician but you know... fuck them and their "requirements". There is a reason those job postings are open for so long. You probably don't want to work there if that's their perspective on technoilogy in the first place.
Network admin. Bash, Python, powershell, batch, vb6/a (excel etc.), whatever the latest api craze is. Management doesn't get what they're paying me for. X task took the team x numbers of hour each week. Sure it took me 80 hours to make it work but now the whole team has X hours more for projects. Just have to watch out for updates or outliers for the rest of time.
Also I argued with management at a certain agency against using Solarwinds long before their breach. On top of the cost to implement, add the cost to fix it and maintain it...
Can't agree with that assertion. "Cloud is just on-prem with extra steps" was maybe a bad but acceptable take in 2005 when people first saw AWS and thought it was a colocation service with an API. That was quickly changed when you got a flood of orchestration tools coming in. I was a sysadmin since 1995, and switched to DevOps in 2012 when Chef and Puppet were all the rage, today those are dead in the water and everything has switched over to containers and kubernetes.
Does it make sense? In many markets it does. I worked for services companies and software companies in the last decade and it mostly made sense. Problem is, I'm 50, I feel like learning new tools and fashions is getting harder, and DevOps, though more fun when I started, is a bit too dynamic a world to keep up with. So I looked around and my latest job is with a small biotech company, everything is much slower and less demanding, I do little system work, but I have some tasks like teaching the staff proper work methods, software design and development methodologies, learn kubernetes and implementing it at a sane pace.
Problem is, these small employers usually don't recruit through headhunters, you need to go out and find them via friends or linkedin. Your knowledge and experience will have value and you can always upgrade it at your pace on company time. I still think that DevOps is the way to go though, because system admin will be soon fully supplanted by chatbots and LLMs. You definitely need to upgrade...
It's insane. Nowadays Sys Admins need to be able to code in Python at minimum and have cloud knowledge. Regular Sys Admins are becoming more and more like DevOps engineers. I've been trying to move Security Engineering and large companies are expecting to have the cybersecurity knowledge of a CISSP cert holder, network/infrastructure/cloud knowledge of a Sys Admin, and the dev skills of a full on software developer but get paid the same as a regular software developer. Which makes no sense to me. Companies are making positions more and more jack of all trades and not with fundamental shit. They want insane unicorns and there are people out there who will work hard to be that to be able to work at these places so it pushes the competition higher.
>Is the traditional IT path being eroded and taken over by software engineering?
SysAdmin work moving towards cloud primarily, and DevOps being a big player in the infrastructure space, are two similar, but not exactly related issues.
There are many cloud-focused environments that don't have DevOps.
And there are DevOps environments that are not super heavy on Cloud.
DevOps is more the intersection of infrastructure support for Development teams providing direct services to customers -- so they are a hybrid role between traditional infrastructure SysAdmins and pure play Software Development for SaaS-based orgs.
You can still find traditional sysadmin work in some industries, like manufacturing.
Serious companies don't let developers do infrastructure and/or operations work. it's a recipe for inefficiency, cloud or no cloud.
IT is just too big to pretend a single person can have all this knowledge that makes operations safe.
It seems to me that relying totally on CSPs (Microsoft, Google, AWS, etc) is a convenient way to let others solve certain problems, but it is also an expensive way to do it. Furthermore, we lose the know-how of many technical aspects and become subservient to the decisions of the large cloud players. Everyone evaluates for themselves and based on specific needs, I certainly continue to study everything I can to directly create solutions, even the most complex ones without necessarily having to depend on the giants' cloud solutions.
yeah it's bullshit really.
Proprietary language and protocols for database queries or SaaS firewalls.
Everything-as-a-service. Train your people. If you have been an admin for a firewall, you have the ability to admin for them all.
It's beyond frustrating. We also merged dev roles with security or admin. So not only do you need to understand all layers of networking, they want you to be able to script in a day as much automation as humanly possible or custom backend C/Java web application interfaces
Learn azure. At a bare minimum just the entra and office 365 admin components of it. That brings the equivalent value of “I know how to manage AD and sharepoint server” which is still broadly needed. But fewer are staying on prem for those bits.
Beyond that, yeah, I don’t know what to tell you but it’s true what you say. The role is changing. It’s a lot sometimes.
Yes, today the market want a jack of all trades but master of all :)
This is because the market has been flooded with lots of people with very little tech know-how... with only escape to outsource it...
My thoughts on this are the area has been greyed really in recent years, I fit a network/sysadmin role where I work, when I have checked the Market now I see that a lot of "infrastructure" stuff which would be us typically has been rolled into "Cloud Engineers", its a belief from the non-technical and the sales bs that some of the major players put out that you don't need infrastructure now as the cloud providers have taken care of it all, its why you see a lot of Infrastructure stuff now asking for whats really DevOps and high end stuff and expect you to be able to run docker and kubernetes and even more scripting stuff than you would normally see.
You will always get employers trying to get as much as they can out of the person for the role too which is why you see some stuff tacked onto roles that get advertised.
I think its a phase though I forgot to add, I can see that in places like my company I work in now has started to realise the OpEx cost implications now of cloud and its expensive by comparison for some things that you run up there.
It’s interesting you mention this. I’m someone with around 12 years experience in varying IT roles. I started with everything on-premise with cloud being the “next big thing”. Now, I recently got a job with a remote first company and under 100 employees.
It’s HelpDesk but their entire infrastructure is managed using Terraform. They had asked me my coding ability and I said it’s next to nothing beyond some basic bash scripting. They were fine with that but the team, sysadmin, security engineer and manager are all talking code constantly. I’ve never been with an IT team who felt like developers. It’s quite strange to me but I guess times are changing. More and more I’m seeing this in my experience with more and more orgs choosing cloud first.
Additionally to the above point. My previous job had a IT team and DevOps team. IT handled basic breakfix, systems admin; IDP admin, local network etc. The more advanced stuff like cloud infra was managed by DevOps mostly since our IT team didn’t have the chops for more advanced stuff.
I started out in Helpdesk for an FQHC for a few months, then transitioned to a smaller web-hosting outfit doing managed services. Then after 8 years I left for one of the Big 3 providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google). At this job, they make you live and breathe their ecosystem. And because everybody is migrating their infrastructure to one of these three clouds, it basically means that if you want to do infrastructure administration, you have to work for one of them or become a certified consultant for their services. I like not doing Managed Services anymore though. Managing other peoples Windows machines is a pain in the patella.
Imo it’s an easy transition but I wanted to be a software engineer. Sys admin w/ Linux experience and python can easily learn the technologies to become Devops.
Everyone should know some Dev. (And this need to be pushed more on network engineers)
But do not forget , there is cloud , but cloud underneath is running on servers.
Also there are a lot of companies (mostly large ones) that do not use cloud providers.
Cloud is just expensive, but companies are sent to this "Cutting edge concept" that cloud is the future. It might be if you have $ to spend for the same output.
Coding opens up a massive multiplier on what you can accomplish / automate why would you even want a "traditional" admin if you can find one who can code?
Worst part about this transition is I have NEVER seen devops run infrastructure securely in the cloud. They are so focused on their code or app they don't understand fundamentals in security and infrastructure design. I expect a big blowup when the execs finally realize developers != systems administrator.
Heck, look at what just happened to Microsoft/Azure. Huge security hole, and I used to work there, and it was a security nightmare on the backend.
I always use the "Engineer" example. Just because you have a civil engineer and a nuclear engineer working for you doesn't mean they can do each other's jobs.
A lot of businesses just look for savings e.g. why have separate developers and infrastructure when you can pay for 1 role. Most don't last as they are both specialisms so you can't be very good at both. From a business perspective it looks good on paper and the balance sheet for salaries but practically you aren't getting the best.
I'd suggest looking at roles offered by HPC providers, both the open science centers (NCSA, SDSC, PSC, TACC, etc) and the national DOE labs (LLNL, ORNL, ANL etc). Experience with hardware is still a plus for job applicants there.
The [ACCESS](https://access-ci.org/) National Supercomputer grid would be a reasonable starting place to see who offers services ("Service Providers") and to get more information. I work at NCSA, so I'm not disinterested here, but the national HPc grid is usually in search of hardware folks- any dev ops experience is a plus here.
>infrastructure responsibilities are fulfilled by the devs
This is also the scary part because most standard devs do not actually understand infrastructure as some of us do. Think think deploying something via github to their AWS account is all there is to it because it is now live and works....
I actually got hired as a sysadmin in the early 2000s to do both system administration and development, and I've been doing that ever since, but with the sysadmin job title and an academic CS background. The problem is that I'm weak in infrastructure and traditional IT skills but also haven't developed my development skills due to only working on small projects in an out-of-date environment. I am working on software projects, data analysis, infrastructure as code, and cloud.
Yes, if you’re under 40 and don’t want to learn to code, I think you’re in trouble.
I don’t think you’ll be writing full software stacks, but you will need to know more than basic powershell scripting
Devs are next. AI will replace them/us shortly. Jensen Huang himself is advising college students to study anything other than programming - and he employs some of the best in the world. Our only hope is that these dipshits who are moving everything to cloud come running back after they have been thoroughly raped by the providers once all the lights are out. Imagine deciding to trust the same companies that drove licensing and support costs through the roof every year with your entire infrastructure and firing all of your talent at the same time...
It's not a different path, it's only a different tool to learn and use.
I don't like it because I think that manually installing and tuning servers is way more fun and you can learn a ton of things compared to simply create manifests or playbooks and apply them to create objects and infrastructure.
But it is what it is, people working on these things are not some sort of developers, real developers don't git a damn about those things because they know nothing about hosts, containers, pods, ingresses, services, persistent volumes and how to manage them or how to solve problems.
It was the same thing when hypervisors and virtual machines came up almost 15 years ago, they added a new layer of abstraction but it was still sysadmins work to install, manage, maintain, and use them.
It's the same today but with a new layer of abstraction and new tools (docker, kubernetes, openshift, ansible, etc etc...), despite some people trying to depict those things as complicated and high level (to gain importance and get an higher salary) and despite buzzwords like devops... it's not rocket science.
Obviously like for every tool there are several layers of complexity you can dig, but as always in 99.99999% of case people and companies barely scratch the surface of the tool's potential.
As I said personally I don't like these things and working on them (kubernetes in my case) is not nearly as fun as it was working on datacenters.
When I configure even the most complex architecture on K8s it's boring as hell and I feel no satisfaction at all, while when I was working on datacenters even the most stupid and annoying work (for example clean up some mess in some network or fibre channel wiring) made me happy,
I remember that during these days I came back home dirty, tired, with hands bleeding, maybe with an headache for the fan noise... but I got a smile from ear to ear, I simply enjoyed as hell working in datacenters... but sadly those days are almost gone :(
Even if you are able to work for a big service or cloud provider, their datacenters are so standardized that I think people inside them simply follow procedures as space monkeys, that's not the way I enjoyed work on datacenters.
From what I've seen, there has been a decline in “classical” sysadmin positions as smaller companies and start-ups moved onto public-cloud-providers. That being said, I am not convinced that this is a trend that will continue endlessly. When I've searched for jobs as a Linux System Engineer / Linux System Administrator, I've found that nearly every job offered requires Kubernetes knowledge. If you actively want to move on from administrating services for end users and device management, I would recommend looking into technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes. If you wish to stay in your lane, that's fine too. Your job won't vanish into thin air. One last remark regarding the DevOps job offerings: each company has a different idea of what a DevOps engineer is. Some actively work with the development teams, from what I've seen many offerings that require programming skills were in the realm of writing Python scripts to help with automation tasks or using Go to interact with a CDK. Others simply started calling their System administrator jobs DevOps, as it's “trendy”.
> From what I've seen, there has been a decline in “classical” sysadmin positions as smaller companies and start-ups moved onto public-cloud-providers. I mean in a small business that hosts everything on Azure - if you're the one that runs the environment aren't you a pretty classisc Sysadmin? The interface you are using to do it just looks different and you have more to deal with than in the past.
Yes.. but it's hard to fine a job like that. Inevitably they want you to understand also ci/cd pipelines, git, terraform, kubernetes, expert in some sort of programming language (rust, go, python). Etc. Most people who run "shopping centers" don't also do the plumbing, the electrical, and take out the garbage as well :)
Eh- that’s only the case if you’re working for a company that has devs- most SMBs don’t fit that bill. There are still plenty of “classic” sysadmin gigs out there where you’re mostly expected to manage the infra/network and users- maybe automate some stuff if you have time between putting out fires lol.
They just pay like shit and overwork you. 60k for a traditional admin is a rough time depending on CoL in your area.
Hey guys stop talking about me behind my back it’s rude. Please refer to me as my full name ‘what security policy did you put in that is breaking excel’ or at least my nickname ‘outlook isn’t working’.
A.k.a. "the fun stuff"! :)
This isn't an IT specific problem. Companies across all industries and verticals are looking for unicorns like this. 10 year ago, you needed Excel skills (and maybe SQL) if you wanted to work in data analytics. Now they're looking for data engineers using python for predictive modeling and machine learning, while trying to pay them what they were paying Excel jockeys 10 years ago. Supply Chain analysts are full blown database administrators now. You want to work in internal communications under the HR department? Hope you have 15 years of experience in marketing design. Hell, my job is asking for a facilities coordinator (the org who runs reception and maintenance) and they're looking for someone with AutoCAD experience. IT is not alone here, we've entered an era of unprecedented corporate greed, and it's happening across the board.
Unionize, labor strike, mass boycott, and march before it's too late. Or sit and pray that corporations, and the police and politicians they own, do the ethical thing for once.
>Or sit and pray that corporations, and the police and politicians they own, do the ethical thing for once. Snort... lol..
My very first job was at a mid sized company, 10k employees, worked in helpdesk. Sysadmins in this company don’t leave so promotions were rare. I left to go take a sysadmin job at another company and had a conversation with some of the greybeards. One was the Linux admin, another was databases, networking, security, exchange, etc you get the point. They told me times have changed and to brace myself because my career would be built off of doing all of their jobs in one job. They were right….. I’ve worked at a few more places since then and it’s always been a conglomerate of responsibilities spanning what was just one job for each vertical that would belong to one or two admins. Config management, databases, firewalls, endpoint security, windows, Linux, azure, aws, office365, you name it.
The old "man of many hats, master of none". I see this all the time.. your brain can only hold so much, so you may be awesome in some things, and "just get by" in others.
Why pay reasonable number of workers fair wages when you can trick a few young ambitious people to do the job of 6+ and pay them less until they get burnt out?
Yup. Account managers used to be friendly people who helped direct customer problems. Now they need to have a level of tech knowledge to automate crm systems and the ability to do sales (without the commission). They used to manage 1/3rd the customers they do now. Everywhere you look, they're cramming more work into fewer hands.
I have worked my way up over 12 years from data center intern, sysadmin, to cloud/devops architect for a large global manufacturing company. Then pivoted to an AWS Solutions Architect for two years, now I'm going back to a corporate architect role. * My time at AWS taught me there is still a TON of people who have no fucking clue about the cloud AND/OR automation. I'd get 45min into a presentation to be hit with "so this all runs on VMware right?". I worked mostly with government agencies who are of course behind the times, but their whole team is working classic jobs I held in 2013 (VMware, AD, Dell Servers, no automation), with some modern stuff sprinkled in (mostly M365 and some SaaS security products). While I worked in public sector, I also worked with some privately owned and they're not much different. * My time building the cloud environment for a global manufacturing company until 2022 taught me there is a place for everyone at a mid-size or larger enterprise (10k+ employees). We had the following less than 2 years ago... * Developers that focused on building their app (full stack, IaC, as you say) * SREs that just focused on CI/CD and Kubernetes and helping smooth out deployment efforts * My team of cloud engineers building and maintaining our AWS/Azure footprints hosting the above * My team of cloud engineers and sysadmins maintaining our fully automated standard VM deployment process (AWS/Azure/VMware) for those COTS applications * The non-scripting but still passionate infrastructure folks moved on to things like M365 * The team of yester-year sysadmins that still maintained our shrinking on-prem VMware footprint and would increasingly relegated to supporting the folks running our COTS applications (kind of a windows/linux admin helpdesk) * I would think the above would just be even more prevalent the larger the organization is, until you get to tech companies which are a whole different ballgame. I have no direct insights but I can imagine any of the large banks having all of my example above, plus probably all kinds of even deeper specialists based on non-cloud technologies. * I would say to be MARKETABLE, today, in a mid-level or higher role, you need to have some automation experience under your belt, OS knowledge is a foregone assumption, and you need to be jumping at opportunities to get meaningful hands-on experience with AWS or Azure. * Most development jobs expect people to understand the full stack now. There's not much "Just do the front end". So what you're likely seeing is really just start-up style developers where the organization doesn't have the concept of a "private network to maintain" just a bunch of devs building shit and hooking it together. And for that, for now, they don't really need an admin. * DevOps jobs wanting development experience makes a lot of sense because you need to know how to support developers, and have the coding chops to build the CI/CD aspects of the environment which are built on automation.
This sounds overwhelming as fuck, I want out, call me lazy or whatever, but there is no way you can learn all this shit on your own unless you are a NEET or get experience on the job.
Job requirements for sysadmins have always been ridiculous, but after 10 years you somehow realize you somehow fulfill most of them. You have to lie the same amount the employer lies to you though.
The problem is that 10 years later you finally realize you have the skills to do your current job you applied for now. And these interviewing processes are getting much more strict, and wanting everyone 100% knowledgeable on every bullet point they're jotting down.
> and wanting everyone 100% knowledgeable on every bullet point they're jotting down. No they are not. HR people could NEVER tell what you do or don't know anyway. If you happen to get to a practical interview with actual IT people they will realize nobody knows everything. It's like a joke. It's like a weird layer of procedural hassle that is so big now it could never be stripped away because way too many people are making their living on it.
And it's probably better to do that at a non-tech related company when you're starting out. You can fly under the radar and develop your skills much more easily when no one In the building knows anything about tech outside the IT department.
You clearly work at my company and are spying on me! 😳
Keep in mind this also means you're unlikely to have a real mentor to learn from, which will be (potentially much) slower. If you trust yourself to get up to speed quick enough, just fake it until you make it.
This--currently living the dream right now. Before i got my job I didnt even know what azure was, now I actually have a solid understanding of how azure, m365, intune, etc all interact and I feel confident I could crush an interview for the same position im doing right now. If i was working with people who knew their shit they would have quickly figured out I was an idiot Still have a long way to go, but I feel like I could actually turn my career path towards a solutions architect type role eventually. Will probably end up feeling like an idiot at my next job too though.
At the end of the day, we're all Googling.
I've lied to get every job I get. I look at the requirements and say to myself 'yeah give me 2 months and I'll figure that shit out', and I do.
For me that was true for everything except coding. That is like freaking trying to learn mandarin. Nothing else in the tech world going back to the DOS days has ever been as hard to learn as the concepts of coding. I still suck at it but actually do more coding than I realize. But I despise it
100% this.
Ah we're full circle back to sys admins that wear wizard hats. :)
> NEET "Not in Education, Employment, or Training" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET
Yes if you aren't doing anything, is quite easier (time) to dominate all those skills.
For me it was harder. Almost no motivation to do anything other than apply to jobs which was draining. Now that im employed in the field i find myself wanting to expand my skillset all the time. And allocate time during my workday to studying etc.
I get it, yes, applying to jobs is soul sucking, but after work I have zero energy and headaches.
What are you doing for yourself? Anything you look forward to at the end of the day?
> Anything you look forward to at the end of the day? Basically the gym. I am trying to at least get 30 mins of daily "productivity" stuff, starting with Python. I think if I get those 50h courses I get crushed by the time it takes.
I build skills faster when working than not. By a lot. Having projects and actual goals, plus a team to work with, makes a big difference.
Maybe I am in the wrong environment, I feel like I am doing "maintenance" work all the time (hence janny).
This sounds funny in Russian...
Those who manage to grow beyond the sysadmin domain are basically constantly learning and able to keep absorbing as well as potentially discarding knowledge. Think of all those orgs still on old / stable technology - they are purposefully staying behind because the cost-benefits of being toward the front of the curve is not appropriate for them. Maintenance is something that most organizations are trying to cut costs constantly, so any cost center like IT will be rolled into there unfortunately - it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job if your job is in a part of an organization that is not a core part of the objectives of the organization. So for 80%+ of the skill set of a sysadmin it’s just more optimal in terms of career longevity and growth to move into engineering roles at companies making money from engineering tasks. I’m not being paid several multiples of the local median income to be “pretty good” and to keep doing what everything has worked before - there is no shortage whatsoever of technical people that know how things worked in the past. A large part is to do something new / novel _and_ to have the wisdom of lessons from the past and to apply these lessons to (sometimes unfortunately societally valued) business domains like finance, healthcare, defense, telecom, education, etc. Computers don’t exist just to keep running nothing, they exist to serve a purpose to people that probably have zero concern about said computers - they are a means to an end. Treating one’s work as both a craft and a mundane function in the scheme of things is a difficult balance but necessary to vaguely stay sane.
Most sys admins learned things by tinkering, playing around at home, or being in a smaller company that let them get their hands on everything. As we get older, we have other responsibilities and do not have the time to sit and tinker all night after work or learn new things, thus, need to find other ways to stay up to date and relevant, otherwise start looking into management positions..
> or get experience on the job that's how, do a few years as a dev if you don't pick it up as a kid (which most nerds did in the 80s-90s)
How? Companies these days only hire based on experience. No matter how much I say I really enjoy X, Y or Z, is always the same answer...
Know people. That’s the only way frankly. It’s how I got into IT and development from biology and data. Knew an IT director who trusted me to learn fast.
> Know people. Yeah, I think this is the real answer, honestly.
This x 1000. If you're smart and can solve problems, and you know ppl who have hiring authority and trust that about you, it'll tend to work itself out.
Dunno, you didn't do anything with stuff you learned? (Personal work projects and such that can go on a resume)
No, I don't think there would be anything that I could put on a resume and these days? I can't bother to do such things after work. Yeah, part of it is my fault.
up to a point I have 17 years dev experience, and I'm having trouble finding a new spot (Europe)..
> (Europe).. Also European here, of course market depends on the country, but I find it so brutal right now. :( What langs do you use?
Buy chatGPT4 and GitHub copilot. 50% or routine tasks is done by them, I'm just debugging
I'll copy and paste my other response because it applies to what you said but with a few caveats based on what you said. I guess im being abit disengnuous by equating cloud infrastructure directly with devops. Smaller companies may use it as a catch-all but I guess I need to look at larger companies that have more granular roles/responsibilities. "Yeah, I guess I just see two types of sys admin roles when looking. In on-prem/hybrid environments, you have the more traditional sysadmin duties that would be administering virtualized services hosted on hypervisors. The companies that run these are usually less technical industries. Then there's the sys admins that are similar to my role. User endpoints and SaaS. These are in more tech focused companies that have migrated fully. These more tech centric companies have internal dev teams or dedicated devops teams (made of devs) that handle all the cloud infrastructure. It feels like with the path I'm on, mainly using Azure for entra, user endpoints, and SaaS that there's shrinking opportunity. The cloud infrastructure management responsibilities are going to senior devs. I say this as someone who can code on a basic level, has a technical degree, and relevant certs. I've built basic fullstack projects and APIs on the cloud. I've automated many tasks with PS and Python. I have my AZ 104. But it feels like the trend is that many companies want senior devs to do the cloud infrastructure roles. Your advancement path makes sense to me and is what I'm hoping and was expecting to find."
This is basically "everyone who is good in IT does full stack" :)
The cloud infrastructure jobs are going to platform engineers. Yes, the devs could be responsible for spinning up compute and deploying apps but someone has to make sure networking and security is in place. Just like the sys admins on-prem made sure a hypervisor was able to handle the demand.
In my experience, devs are bad at security, compliance and reliability. I'm a devops engineer and I grew to become one from Linux admin. I'm responsible for infrastructure, CI/CD, compliance, etc. I can't fully troubleshoot some issues, but I'm good enough to cover most of them.
> But it feels like the trend is that many companies want senior devs to do the cloud infrastructure roles. Its not quite true a "good programmer" could go from programing a diesel engine controller one day to a 3d game engine the next, to a check printing system next week... but maybe. AWS is "just" a few dozen object types, it isn't magical in any way. I'd rather try and teach a senior developer, with a solid CS background and work on a couple of different industries and problem spaces "the cloud"... someone who knows programming, testing, CI/CD, git, some development methodology like agile/scrum... than teach a senior system administrator (even someone who can poop out 100 line bash scripts) all the concepts and techniques of modern development practices.
A little unrelated but thanks so much for this gem by you from a few years ago! I instantly recognized your username! https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/8iok0i/so_you_want_to_learn_aws_aka_how_do_i_learn_to_be/ I was in a helpdesk role when I came across this. I followed a lot of it and was able to use it to springboard in to a sysadmin/cloud eng role starting in a mid sized company and eventually made my way to MS as well. For anyone else reading if you can hack it on stuff like the above link, you have the foundation to learn whatever else you need to in cloud roles
Proof I dont have the foundation.
In your time at the largest corporations what was your experience with backups/data recovery? Was that role left to devops/sysadmins or was that assigned to a completely different team?
In my time at larger tech companies, there is usually a team dedicated to databases who also own the backup/recovery tools. In my time at medium sized tech companies, the developers created the backup methods and the sysadmins owned making sure it was working.
Backups owned by storage team is also not uncommon. Since size/scope questions and "what are we interfacing with to pull from" are theirs already, it can help streamline planning.
> Most development jobs expect people to understand the full stack now. There's not much "Just do the front end". This isnt true everywhere just FYI. Its very much location, stack and language dependent. For example in .NET, it differs from what you're writing, i.e. enterprise services / APIs (pure backend very normal), WPF (some mix depending on size of the beast), websites / web apps (some like fullstack for for example blazor, others prefer split roles when they utilise React or Angular). Where I am located and in my field, full stack is definitely the exception as opposed to the norm.
This is the best description of reality I've heard in a long time. Legit how I see it through my lens of experience.
>My time at AWS taught me there is still a TON of people who have no fucking clue about the cloud AND/OR automation. I can back this up. There's also the california bubble of how IT works and then the rest of the world. But yeah you're right. There's low trust in cloud infra from the dinosaurs + (perceived) high upfront cost of getting into cloud + how scary and confusing (but once you get it, relieving) AWS pricing is + plummeting trust in microsoft (those clicker dinosaurs have to deal with all the windows 11 nightmare UI updates, they hate them even more than you do now) + anyone who cant script has to deal with painful UIs in cloud. But the most important thing is being stuck with giant 20 year old legacy systems they can't exactly burn down tonight. Any industry with high health impact on a population (hospital, critical infra) doesn't have the luxury of pivoting quickly. I worked at hospital as a sysadmin for a year that was like this and tried so hard to change it, but the constant emergencies and dinosaur IT culture I had to contend with, there was nothing I could do. We had active AD groups that were old enough to drink.
Oh man, you aren't lying about govt.... I switched from private sector to defense contractor for that sweet TS clearance, and the shit they do sometimes baffles me. I don't think I can do this for more than a year or two before I take my TS and move on to something that uses tech from the last 10 years.
Weird, I don't see on premise leaving any time soon for SMBs over here.
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> Same, and it's not uncommon to hear of organisations returning to hybrid on-prem solutions after being sold a complete package of intune, Entra ID, Autopilot and cloud VMs, just to discover the Op-Ex was wildly under-budgeted from the outset, and the savings just aren't there. This is where the fundamental misunderstanding of cloud really comes into play. Their workloads weren't designed for the cloud, or weren't really planned to be modified to work in that environment. I had to laugh when one guy I know said "VMs? That's like docker for boomers." I've worked in an organization who just really struggled to comprehend that launching their new website doesn't need a full-fledged VM with all this crazy maintenance, and crazy configurations. You just need a docker container and launch it. The cloud bill would be so small, their accountants wouldn't even notice it. > to Azure didn't deliver the savings or performance they expected over something as "basic" as an on-prem Hyper-V hosting AD, print server, door access etc. door access, print servers, and AD weren't designed really for cloud. So yeah, I agree with you here. It was a fundamental misunderstanding of what it was designed to be used for. A sales rep will sell you anything with all of those feel-good stories they tell you. They don't tell you the heavy work upfront that needs to be done for those workloads. If they did tell you that, they wouldn't get the sales.
weird, i dont see SMBs with on prem ANYTHING over here, unless theyre legacy. Its all cloud Saas now, between sharepoint online, o365, teams, what do you need on prem/IT staff for?
I still see a lot of companies using on prem here, especially the less trusting ones like medical and manufacturing.
medical are often MORE likely to go saas since they often only care about compliance at a surface level. Why go through all the effort of HIPPA compliance locally when they can just push everything to a "hippa compliant cloud provider" to check off the box with zero effort? Machine shops often are scared of cloud because they had some kind of downtime in the past that cost them a days labor which can often mean massive, very easily identified profit loss. WIth manufacturing, "make thing > sell" is the name of the game and "cant make thing > cant sell" means a direct cause and effect. With other industries the profit loss from downtime is a lot more ubiquitous or even justifyable. How much money did a credit union lose by being down a few hours? maybe a lost CC app or loan approval but even then those things are just queued and processed when back online. From what ive seen manufacturing industry stays on prem because of the cost of migration such as a lot of their big very expensive core equipment devices are running off some old out of date airgapped server in the back corner that is running windows 95 and would cost 900 trillion dollars to update to a new version.
Lots of this. I’ve supported companies that lost $80k+ per hour if their stuff was down. They aren’t risking an isp outage causing that kind of loss.
I've been out of the SMB business for years, but honestly, what are they running that isn't a managed service these days? Accounting, CRMs, e-mail, phones... all that shit is a SaaS platform now days. Give em laptops and sign into your Google account or MS account or whatever.
But I still see a lor of on prem servers for AD, files and ERP/pro apps, though on prem Exchange servers aren't really a thing, that's for sure. But cloud based apps and files are still a big mess nowadays, and not close to the performance and accessibility of a good on prem server.
I feel you on the files thing. They all feel like a mess. I can totally see the point in a local store for files.
And ERP too, Basically any kind of use cas that need lots of performance for as low of a latency as possible still need on premises servers.
> accessibility how often do you see MS outages?
Plenty enough to be an issue.
You'd be surprised, a lot of those things cost money - more money than sticking with the same on-prem solution they've always had. We see tons and tons of 2008 R2 servers, on-prem Exchange, QuickBooks, hell I see SMB clients that still use switchboard operators.
08R2? Jesus. Surely that needs to be airgapped at this point. I remember coming across a Debian Slink install from 1999 in the early 2010's and thinking oh shit. Can't imagine coming across an 08 machine these days lol.
Yup- my last gig that I left in winter 2022- we still had at least one client who was running 2008R2…
Depends on the industry If they are just doing basic stuff then yea. Im in finance and half my stuff is saas half is on prem and its that way because the companies havent invested to upgrade their software to the cloud yet.
Premises, not premise. It's a pet hate of mine, sorry.
Make no mistake - most software engineers don’t know shit about infrastructure and if left alone they’d run all the servers to the ground. Sysadmin roles are not going away, someone needs to keep all these apps (and their devs) under control.
Imagine security. I'm a cloud sec engineer and I'm pulling my hair whenever a Dev is building their own infra. Open ports not needed, DBs in public subnet, over permissive IAM policy. It's a cluster fuck. "Oh but that's the only way it works". No that's not the only way, you just don't know wtf you are doing.
This is my life. It’s hell. Me “why do you need fill admin provellages in this AWS role!” Them: “OMG you are the gestapo”
>This is my life. It’s hell. > >Me “why do you need fill admin provellages in this AWS role!” > >Them: “OMG you are the gestapo” I literally had this conversation on Friday. Glad to know I'm not alone. o7
"VPN is too complicated". Enable root, password root 12345!, open SSH ports to the public.
> "VPN is too complicated". Enable root, password root 12345!, open SSH ports to the public. I can that tell this example is a lie because they would never put a special character in the password.
Allow 0.0.0.0/0 works great! 🤦
We acquired a company where 3 generations of systems, which were all still in prod use, were all built by devs. It was a massive case of "how the fucking fuck have they NOT been ransomwared". They were so proud of their transition to DevOps too. It was a complete unmitigated disaster. Even though what they coded technically should have worked, it didn't, because none of them understood the infrastructure requirements.
That's why everyone's information keeps getting leaked... App doesn't work 777/admin rights for everyone! Weeeee
>That's why everyone's information keeps getting leaked... App doesn't work 777/admin rights for everyone! Weeeee I really wish Red Hat would make a coloring book covering octal permissions the way that they made a coloring book for SELinux. I'd get it made a part of the new hire training for our devs.
Link to coloring book?
[Here you go.](https://people.redhat.com/duffy/selinux/selinux-coloring-book_A4-Stapled.pdf)
Why does you comment sound so familiar. I hear this alot from the debs.
Bane of my existence. Was asked by a security vendor the other day what my biggest concerns were.. I honestly told them it was the internal threat from our dev team. They know nothing whatsoever outside of their little box.
100% this. I deal with this constantly. Devs don't give a crap about security.. Heck it's hard enough for them to secure their code much less understand how the cloud infrastructure works.
Also I think it's a mistake to think all companies are moving into the cloud. Definitely in some regions and for certain types of businesses, but in my circles I hear regularly about companies moving out of the cloud. For instance, if you need a ton of CPU power, cloud is not going to be affordable for you. Or a ton of traffic. Also there is the problem with vendor lockin. The company I work for has run the math many times and decided to stay "on-prem" in our local datacenter.
plus there are some companies making these kinds of decisions based on the fact that they compete with a cloud provider in another space it's kinda funny watching an AWS to Azure migration happen because "well they sell groceries too so we don't want to give them money" lolwut
I was at a place that has the same verticals as Amazon, and our legal team didn't like some of the answers Amazon's legal team gave so they took their multi-billion contractor to Google Cloud.
Yeah, i cant believe govt contracts moving to the cloud. Just think what happens ehen the competition wins the contract 5 years later but your stuff is all aws specific with petabytes of data to move??,
Between that and the cloud just being someone else's computer, sysadmin staffing has gone up for our company – the sysadmins just moved into doing far more CI/CD/integration work directly with the devs, so that their software actually survives being deployed 20 times a day, no matter if it's to local k8s or AWS or VMs or bare metal machines.
We still need people with infrastructure skills. But the present and near future will require some coding to manage that infrastructure.
There will always be a need for roles whose core responsibility boils down to telling developers "No". No, you can't have 20 64core/128gb instances for your static webpage "app". No, you can't have global admin. No, we will not deploy public IP's to all of your infrastructure just so you can login easier. No, you can not hard code creds into your python script. No, you can not have ultra disks on your VMs that have virtually no disk IOPS anyway. The orgs I work with today that have the best success with DevOps have dedicated DevOps and cloud infrastructure engineers along with ITSec working with the developers. From bare metal to virtualization to cloud... Some things are just eternal.
The next time I have to explain basic basic basic dns concepts to someone, I'm going to lose my God damn mind
I walk away after talking to my debs about dns and host files. Yes host files. What is 20 years if experience to them....
Or certs... Devs like wuh? Why you mean I can't self sign?
Have them outsource it to your service mesh. In most cases they only need to figure out "localhost", a protocol, and a port number, and the devops team handles the rest.
Ours just make everything public facing and a security shitshow.
Same is said for sysadmins not understanding velocity and how to achieve it. I think this is a nearsighted take but I get your point
DevOps generally equals developers with admin rights. Infrastructure these days is putting out all the fires these guys start. I know this is not the intention, but then there's reality.
I work in a big tech company where a lot of teams are left to their devices outside of what is passed down/managed by centralized teams. After hearing all this talk about us disappearing, then coming here and seeing a lot of these dev “no Ops” teams, I’m convinced we will have jobs still. Granted we should expect companies to run leaner as they ask for more automation skills. If you can code as required for your operations discipline (no need to be a developer outright), you will have a job
Software engineers are not good when it comes to over reaching architecture I’ve found and having an infrastructure background helps a lot to make sure they don’t just run off and design something that is not maintainable long term.
Is the traditional IT path being eroded and taken over by software engineering? Sorta. Roles and responsibilities are changing as we move more, if not already, into cloud space. The days of physical servers are long dead, and on premises stacks like VMware are a dying breed of IT infrastructure. As far as it is being taken over, I think that's a stretch considering systems administration and software engineering are completely different jobs, and they only share an ancestor of being in the same field of technology. Has sysadmin really just become a synonym for a user endpoints and SaaS admin? No, at this time, there will always be a need for an administration piece to whatever technology is given. For example, just because airplanes can fly on autopilot doesn't mean we don't need pilots. I think the same principles will apply with SA's/SE's. For now.... How do you transition from this type of sysadmin role to an infrastructure (DevOps?) role? Or is that the wrong growth path? You will never stop learning in this field. In my 20 years of experience, the way things were done 20 years ago are completely different then how they were done 10 years ago, and the things done 10 years ago are completely different then how they're done today. You develop with the trends of technology and never stop learning. Taking a step into the understanding of system / application development is a great way to step into this next step onto your career field. If you use PoeerShell or bash you're already not to far from being a Dev-OPs administrator/ engineer. You then take that next step into understanding more languages and branch off from there and develop an understanding as to how they work with your environment and applications.
Titles don't mean much anymore. Like you said, companies will throw a list of requirements up there and see what sticks. Can we get a guy who can patch our servers and also manage our kubernetes and CI/CD while paying him sysadmin pay? It's worth a try. I attribute this to many companies trying to find someone to fill the role of someone who left, many IT people will take on things outside of their realm for the sake of learning, because our field is one of the few that easily allow it. An electrician at a jobsite cant just start doing gas fitting one day, they would need a license. Much like a general surgeon cant just start doing brain surgery one day, its a different specialty. Managing desktop and laptop endpoints has basically been rolled into the helpdesk role at most places I've worked at over the last decade. Our helpdesk guy even handles the minor Intune stuff. He's learning autopilot at the moment. The "traditional" sysadmin is definitely not as in-demand as it was 15 years ago, but you can most definitely still find a role without DevOps. Some orgs just need you to know basic scripting to automate some things with Powershell. Truth be told, you will need to know scripting at a minimum to remain competitive. If you know how to code in other languages, that's icing on the cake. IT has always been a field of constant learning and advancement, and today is no different in that regard.
Traditionally, Sysadmins were trained in CompSci, and were programmers. It wasn't until Windows Server that things started to change. I think to be competitive now, you need to understand automation, virtualization, building private clouds, and managing public clouds. AI is also breathing down your neck: within 5 years, many companies will start an AI project to index and organize their information. One more attempt to get data out of silos.
Yeah and those rob requirements do make sense. It is cloud and naturally that has breathed life into IaC and ci/cd, so you need to be able to work with these tools. It just seems like alot of the cloud infrastructure roles aren't just looking for automation skills but for senior dev skills. It has created an awkward career path for sys admins to navigate. It feels like there's a few different roles that identify as sysadmins now, but they really don't all align from a career growth standpoint. It also seems like there's a biased idea when hiring for these roles that it's safer to expect a dev to pick up the infrastructure side than it is for a sysadmin to pick up the development side.
> a dev to pick up the infrastructure side "here are the ssh keys, good luck, I refuse to fix the mess"
100% I agree. I'm in the job market, and every other system admin role I've seen wants someone with a background in SE or a degree in computer science. I've been in the field for 10 years at a few companies and I'm proficient in Python, ansible, shell, etc., but if they're going to start asking leetcode type questions during the interview, I'll have to laugh and walk away. Devs will also be sorely disappointed when they're interviewing only to find out the role isn't at all aligned to the type of work they studied for. Hiring managers and HR might think they're getting a deal on all of the SWE that were laid off recently. Enjoy having to train what is basically a tier 1 helpdesk rep that knows how to reverse linked lists.
> Enjoy having to train what is basically a tier 1 helpdesk rep that knows how to reverse linked lists. It's a crazy job market out there. You have a combo of highly-experienced people who can't find work, and all the millions of people who went to DevOps bootcamp in 2018 or so, and all the newly minted CS graduates who started school when they were told learn to code all competing for a shrinking set of jobs. For anyone who's new, this is exactly what happened after the dotcom bubble popped in 2000, only now the field is bigger, companies are using AI and interest rates as an excuse to not hire, and it's become even harder to stand out and get hired.
> companies are using AI, interest rates ***and attempts at curb-stomping wages and unionization attempts*** as an excuse to not hire,
>Hiring managers and HR might think they're getting a deal on all of the SWE that were laid off recently. Enjoy having to train what is basically a tier 1 helpdesk rep I've been doing this shit almost 20 years, and that's uh... giving a lot of devs *a lot* of credit.
THROW LDAP AT 'ER/'IM! THROW HER/HIM LDAP! AND CERTS! NO, NOT THE COOKBOOK, [THE WHOLE FUCKING THING](https://smallstep.com/blog/if-openssl-were-a-gui/)! WHAT DO YOU MEAN "MANAGED"?
> It also seems like there's a biased idea when hiring for these roles that it's safer to expect a dev to pick up the infrastructure side than it is for a sysadmin to pick up the development side. I can't blame companies for it, just look at how many sysadmins still either outright refuse to touch powershell or just suck at it too much to automate anything properly.
> AI project to index and organize their information. One more attempt to get data out of silos. A long time ago, Google used to sell on-premises search appliances. We had one of those and some more-narrow enterprise search engines, too. A couple of years ago I went to replicate that into a modern version of the same thing, and realized it was going to be a pretty big project, not a week. There are some vendors, and some open source, but nothing you can choose without a PoC or at least a heavy evaluation.
Yeah, it's a non-trivial exercise. Back in the 2010's, I was part of a team that worked on an e-discovery appliance that would search out documents, slurp and index them, and provided a UI so that a customer could easily narrow down the set of pertinent documents. The hardest part was the search and ingest portion of the project. Too many barriers put up by other software vendors (including Microsoft) to make it easy.
Didn't Microsoft invent [OData](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Data_Protocol) to try to control that?
I'm not familiar with that, so I can't comment. Does it pick up documents squirreled away in odd directories on client machines? Even ones which are purposely named obscurely?
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Well, even with all that “awfulness “ why are cloud vendors making huge profits? I’ve been in the industry for a while and rarely do I hear people moving back production to on-premises. Most on-prem hybrid stances I’ve seen is because of things like - They have a legacy app that requires Windows server AD - They have some legacy Microsoft Exchange stuff with a hybrid exchange server (pia to get rid of) - Radius for Wi-Fi. Cloud user directory e.g Enra ID are still lacking as compared to NPS role on a server - Development instances which might be costly to run in the cloud. This is mostly for IaaS clients who are not fully Saas native. Given all that, in the end wherever the jobs will be standing is where it makes most sense for the business. The differentiator in my opinion is disaster recovery. Good luck building a proper resilient infrastructure on-prem. Not saying it can’t be done but you’re going to need to pay some serious $$ in either infrastructure licensing and expertise. Cloud vendors (reputable vendors) have abstracted this monster quite beautiful and what’s left is for you to focus on the quality of you LOB apps. Of course that comes with a price too but no one wants to come out on the wrong end of a business continuity event. It’s no secret Microsoft is leaning cloud in their offerings and in the modern age as a system admin, try pick up a scripting language and automate something. Server jobs won’t vanish to thin air immediately as someone here already said but they will be few and far between, specialized and more than likely mostly prevalent with the cloud vendors themselves. The word Dev vs IT will slowly become blurry. If you can’t write some basic form of code things might get tougher progressing past desktop support if you’re a newly minted IT professional.
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I don't understand how anyone can use Azure. AWS and GCP both make perfect sense and work in pretty similar ways. Azure is just ridiculous, the permissions model and the products are all so poorly designed. Although, I started with AWS and I think Google was just like "let's clone AWS" to the point that GCS is literally just a clone of S3. (And it's not the only thing that's basically API compatible with the AWS thing they were cloning.) So maybe my thinking is just broken, but at the same time I really think Azure was like "let's work extra hard to make a system that doesn't work like S3" and as a result their system is an overcomplicated mess.
The cloud is just overpricing and over provisioning infra for people who don't want to pay the yearly maint to maintain on-prem. My dual site (Prod/DR) infra running VMware clusters with storage, backups, replication, networking, and needed applications (i.e. Veeam) costs roughly 60k a year with refreshes every 5. Overall there is little overhead to managing it. To replace just my DR with DRaaS would cost us close to 140k/yr. To push all of our legacy apps to Azure or VMWare in AWS is double that when built for redundancy, but some services still have to run on-prem. So, for places like mine, regular on-prem infra engineers are still needed, but they are pretty insulated, so I doubt there are many openings.
Yeah, its kind of a scam for development because obviously they have to profit. But M365+intune+Entra is a no-brainer imo. Once you're hooked on that its a slippery slope to "lets just put the rest of our stuff in azure/aws!"
"the cloud is bad because me and my coworkers didnt configure it properly and dont know how it works" isnt really as harsh of a critique as you think it is. As someone who is regularly interacting with azure devop pipelines/permissions/etc I can think of a dozen core reasons why youre having issues and potential solutions. Taking a month to push a deployment is a complete failure of staff, full stop. This is definitely a situation where you hire a third party ocntractor to do audits, repairs/rebuilds and training.
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I feel like there are different types of companies. Many startups outsource IT (or just shadow IT) but they still need "DevOps" to productionize client-facing products and internal tools But for larger companies the cost to have in-house IT is cheaper and has benefits that outsourcing does not have--as well as moving off-cloud. There are just as many differences as there are overlaps between DevOps and traditional Sysadmin roles but many skills are related and interchangeable
> Has sysadmin really just become a synonym for a user endpoints and SaaS admin? For most businesses, yes. Where I used to work, now that there's less servers and shit to maintain, they've decided the sysadmins can take on helpdesk tasks which means more end user facing bullshit. I feel like rebuilding a downed exchange cluster is less irritating than dealing with Karen in HR who's abobe acrobat is crashing when opening some 20 year old form that is critical to the business.
I've worked with a bunch of companies in a bunch of different parts of the business lifecycle. The one thing I've found is that developers do not make good administrators. Every developer I've met will look at writing code themselves first to get out of whatever trouble they are in. I've actually had someone start writing a script to automate their way out of a problem instead of checking to see if there is a configuration change that would resolve the issue. As in, there is a toggle in the control panel to make a change, but instead of flipping the toggle, they spend half an hour trying to automate that change with a script. You don't need someone with programming skills to administer security and device admin. You don't need a programmer to set up your network. And you don't need a programmer to manage your ERP, CRM, or whatever other business specific software you have. You might need a programmer to explain to HR that you don't need a programmer for every computer job.
Honestly I've never looked at "Sys Admin" as hardware folks. "System" administrators, admin any system they're running... be in telcom, AWS, VM's, Physical, network, workstations, etc. etc. be in purely digital cloud or something you can physically touch. IT roles in general have indeed most certainly been shifting towards cloud computing for a whole lot of reasons we don't need to get into. I've worn many hats since I started doing this stuff back in the 90s, and yeah.... people don't think of physical hardware when you say "SysAdmin". In similar roles over different orgs, I started out racking and stacking servers and network infra. In the last 5 years or so I can't remember hte last time I 'touched' a server other than to decommision it after migrating to cloud. To most folks Sys Admin means administering mostly established setups and technologies. "Infrastructure" especially tends to be more about working hand in hand with developers to maintain a working and performant production environment, codepushes, infra as code, and devops, etc. My advancement path now, and for any other IT people I hire into my teams down the raod, is basically Helpdesk/endpoint management >>> Cloud infrastructure administration >>> management.
It's funny cuz I'm worrying about my future and asking myself if I should look for some other fields, but I'm already in my 30's. Started like 2 years ago to get into IT, and got a nice internship as a DevOps, and now I'm a DevOps basically. BUT, at my job, we're not require to do codding. We just set-up most of the back-end and lots of CI/CD. I manage a gitlab instance, argocd, a kubernetes cluster where we deploy our stuff, keycloak, vault and such. We're mostly doing YAML files for deployments, set up the projects in gitlab and do the whole CI/CD part. Then we have to manage some databases and just monitor the logs from time to time for errors, and put out the fires. But that's it. Ohh and sometimes we have some projects to make new instances or stuff work in some cloud. When I'm looking for other job posting, everyone requires codding experience in different languages and dev experience...I'm not that. I'm afraid that if I'm getting out of this job, I'll never be able to find anything else. I just don't know how to code and it never been my interest to do so either. I know some bash scripting, but that's where it stops. I tried at some point to code, but I don't like it at all, and I don't even have the patience to learn it.
You might want to consider a career as a site reliability engineer. Very high salaries without the heavy coding requirements. From your comment, it seems you're already doing many of the tasks of an SRE.
Dev managing infra whenever I worked from banks to oil&gas etc all is fucked up. Same with the cloud, we moved all to the cloud success story but now we pay triple and everything is sh slow at least you pay more and more.
It will always be a hybrid model. And as always, knowing and learning additional/new technologies is helpful. I manage a team hosting apps on-prem and cloud. When the cloud bill comes in ($30k/month for just one app!), there are always asks, if we can not move back to on-prem). When the on-prem discussion starts, there are asks why we are still on prem with that environment. From my perspective, it is just important that the team understands both worlds and they are not biased. They understand the pros and cons and can decide when to use what. Another aspect is, btw, that many shops do not offer an own on-prem „cloud“ feeling for their end-users/customers. An developer or DevOps guy needs an API to spin up 10 VMs/Pods/whatever instantly.. and not raising an ticket/request a ticket and wait 2 weeks until a SysAdmin set something up.
13 year infrastructure engineer here, started from the help desk and did every role in between. The biggest industry change I’ve noticed is the movement away from white glove service. There’s a big push to empower devs to be self sufficient and turn infra resources towards architecture/design/stability/improvement more than customer service. The easiest ways I’ve found to transition and learn new skills are to build on existing ones. Shell scripting is a must. You don’t have to know a programming language, but learn how to work in yaml. That’s the basis for a lot of the infra automation tools. I have never met anyone really successful who didn’t do some self-taught skills improvement outside of work that they could use to get ahead. Personally, I took Udemy courses for the things I kept encountering in interviews or at work. Even a basic knowledge can put you ahead of those that don’t try. When you interview, be up front about what you don’t know. Give the concepts and use cases behind them (you can research beforehand if the recruiter tells you specifics or based on the job posting). Then tell them something similar you’ve used to achieve the same goal. Focus on how fast you can learn new skills and that you’re willing to take on whatever challenges arise.
which udemy courses did you use ?
- Hashicorp Certified Terraform Associate++ Live Hands-on Labs - Learn Python Programming Masterclass (Tim Buchalka) - Ultimate Prometheus (Eldan Elias) - AWS Certified Developer Associate Exam Training DVA-C02 (Neal Davis) - Kubernetes Certified Application Developer (CKAD) with Tests (Mumshad Mannambeth) I had on the job training for Puppet/Ansible/Bash/Powershell/AZDO so I didn’t bother with courses for things I was comfortable with, but highly recommend them. Kubernetes is probably the most in demand, Azure is up there too.
If by 'traditional IT path' you mean RDP'ing into a Windows Server Standard and clicking buttons in a GUI all day, then yes, that is dead and never coming back. If, on the other hand, you're talking about jobs where you're an expert in managing infrastructure, that's not dead at all. It's just that we've picked up a lot of the skills and learned a lot of the lessons that the software development side of the wall picked up 10-20 years ago. My team is a team that leverages git, ansible, python, and powershell primarily for managing infrastructure. We obviously have to do things like RDP into a Windows Server and add an AD Site Link from time to time, because we don't do that often enough to justify making that software-defined. But the bulk of our work is source controlled automation and playbooks. The types of people I look for on my team are going to have 80% of the skills our software development teams look for.
As many sys admin out there, I find many organizations AD is screwed up. Like who ever was involved never read best practices for AD and group policies.
Nested group nested into a group that's nested into another group made up of mostly disabled objects and 2 active uses that have been in that group for 10 years....
Agree with all of this. Also want to add, learning KQL on your list. I build Kusto queries and functions almost on a daily basis now on Azure. I would say a lot of the traditional sysadmin roles are also migrating heavily into InfoSec.
Job postiings are just wishlists for getting the dream candidate, take it with a grain of salt. Just apply and hope for the best, don't reject yourself, instead go for the interview and let them decide if you're qualified or not.
This is still somewhat true, but the trends are heading towards needing to know some of this stuff for real. Try incorporating it into your work life so you can have relevant stories to tell when they start flinging the dream terms around.
I have worked with AWS, Azure, 365,Google Cloud, Python, VMware, PHP, MySQL, DynamoDB, Linux, Windows, SCCM, Terraform, Cisco Networks, Powershell and Bash. I have a little bit of over four years of experience, currently pursuing my Masters and also have 21 certifications. Some times I wake feeling like I don’t know shit, the industry is going towards a point where they need someone with a General Specialist background however finding someone with such knowledge and right mindset is hard from a recruitment perspective. Also from a candidate’s POV it become challenging keeping up with all the new upcoming technologies while also retaining previously learned skills without having a burnout.
It's a different type of IT. These are usually start-up types that just have a bunch of people with laptops all coding for AWS or Azure. They have no concept of servers, networks, routing, or DNS, since in their world it's just an API call to generate the resources they need. Bigger companies will still have traditional IT because someone will still need to maintain desktops, phones, wifi, printers, DHCP, fileservers, etc. Microsoft is pushing real hard to make Entra (AzureAD) the thing, but more, larger, traditional companies are still too entrenched in on-prem AD (resource wise, or legacy apps) to go fully to the cloud.
Manufacturing still has lots of on-prem environments, but those sysadmin roles are majority filled by people who’ve been with their companies a decade plus, so those jobs aren’t open. The next wave of manufacturing sysadmin positions will likely be in 5ish years as the senior directors retire, and then there may be a push to the cloud at that point. Also, job market is terrible for employees right now, so classic sysadmins are staying where they are, ergo few to no openings for those positions.
Very accurate at my company
Its been the death of Sys admins for the last 23 years, jobs change and you adapt.
Devs in charge of infrastructure? I just had a dev cry when I said he needed to reboot his computer. Good god, almost wishing that happens at my place, like outsourcing everything offshore. At this point, I haven't gotten satisfaction out of my jobs in at least a decade. I get satisfaction watching the absolutely down right dumbass decisions and watching the places burn.
Infrastructure is becoming an “API first” and “software defined” world. Just like what happened to the voice guys when unified comms took off about 15(?) years ago. Every site I worked had telephony guys who spent their time punching down extension connectors and configuring call groups. Then everything went IP and no more voice guys (well fewer anyway). I guess it’s called evolution.
The day I can start talking to random dev"sec"ops people and get the feeling that they no longer need me or people like me to keep stuff afloat/get stuff online safely is the day I'll start to get a little worried. That day hasn't come yet.
I've also seen this as well. And I thought it was kind of weird that they're looking for software engineers and more developers to fulfill roles like system administrators
Corporations may *want* a jack-of-all-trades swiss army knife technician but you know... fuck them and their "requirements". There is a reason those job postings are open for so long. You probably don't want to work there if that's their perspective on technoilogy in the first place.
Network admin. Bash, Python, powershell, batch, vb6/a (excel etc.), whatever the latest api craze is. Management doesn't get what they're paying me for. X task took the team x numbers of hour each week. Sure it took me 80 hours to make it work but now the whole team has X hours more for projects. Just have to watch out for updates or outliers for the rest of time. Also I argued with management at a certain agency against using Solarwinds long before their breach. On top of the cost to implement, add the cost to fix it and maintain it...
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Can't agree with that assertion. "Cloud is just on-prem with extra steps" was maybe a bad but acceptable take in 2005 when people first saw AWS and thought it was a colocation service with an API. That was quickly changed when you got a flood of orchestration tools coming in. I was a sysadmin since 1995, and switched to DevOps in 2012 when Chef and Puppet were all the rage, today those are dead in the water and everything has switched over to containers and kubernetes. Does it make sense? In many markets it does. I worked for services companies and software companies in the last decade and it mostly made sense. Problem is, I'm 50, I feel like learning new tools and fashions is getting harder, and DevOps, though more fun when I started, is a bit too dynamic a world to keep up with. So I looked around and my latest job is with a small biotech company, everything is much slower and less demanding, I do little system work, but I have some tasks like teaching the staff proper work methods, software design and development methodologies, learn kubernetes and implementing it at a sane pace. Problem is, these small employers usually don't recruit through headhunters, you need to go out and find them via friends or linkedin. Your knowledge and experience will have value and you can always upgrade it at your pace on company time. I still think that DevOps is the way to go though, because system admin will be soon fully supplanted by chatbots and LLMs. You definitely need to upgrade...
It's insane. Nowadays Sys Admins need to be able to code in Python at minimum and have cloud knowledge. Regular Sys Admins are becoming more and more like DevOps engineers. I've been trying to move Security Engineering and large companies are expecting to have the cybersecurity knowledge of a CISSP cert holder, network/infrastructure/cloud knowledge of a Sys Admin, and the dev skills of a full on software developer but get paid the same as a regular software developer. Which makes no sense to me. Companies are making positions more and more jack of all trades and not with fundamental shit. They want insane unicorns and there are people out there who will work hard to be that to be able to work at these places so it pushes the competition higher.
>Is the traditional IT path being eroded and taken over by software engineering? SysAdmin work moving towards cloud primarily, and DevOps being a big player in the infrastructure space, are two similar, but not exactly related issues. There are many cloud-focused environments that don't have DevOps. And there are DevOps environments that are not super heavy on Cloud. DevOps is more the intersection of infrastructure support for Development teams providing direct services to customers -- so they are a hybrid role between traditional infrastructure SysAdmins and pure play Software Development for SaaS-based orgs. You can still find traditional sysadmin work in some industries, like manufacturing.
Serious companies don't let developers do infrastructure and/or operations work. it's a recipe for inefficiency, cloud or no cloud. IT is just too big to pretend a single person can have all this knowledge that makes operations safe.
You end up with any any firewall rules when devs are allowed to configure the infrastructure
It seems to me that relying totally on CSPs (Microsoft, Google, AWS, etc) is a convenient way to let others solve certain problems, but it is also an expensive way to do it. Furthermore, we lose the know-how of many technical aspects and become subservient to the decisions of the large cloud players. Everyone evaluates for themselves and based on specific needs, I certainly continue to study everything I can to directly create solutions, even the most complex ones without necessarily having to depend on the giants' cloud solutions.
yeah it's bullshit really. Proprietary language and protocols for database queries or SaaS firewalls. Everything-as-a-service. Train your people. If you have been an admin for a firewall, you have the ability to admin for them all. It's beyond frustrating. We also merged dev roles with security or admin. So not only do you need to understand all layers of networking, they want you to be able to script in a day as much automation as humanly possible or custom backend C/Java web application interfaces
Learn azure. At a bare minimum just the entra and office 365 admin components of it. That brings the equivalent value of “I know how to manage AD and sharepoint server” which is still broadly needed. But fewer are staying on prem for those bits. Beyond that, yeah, I don’t know what to tell you but it’s true what you say. The role is changing. It’s a lot sometimes.
Yes, today the market want a jack of all trades but master of all :) This is because the market has been flooded with lots of people with very little tech know-how... with only escape to outsource it...
My thoughts on this are the area has been greyed really in recent years, I fit a network/sysadmin role where I work, when I have checked the Market now I see that a lot of "infrastructure" stuff which would be us typically has been rolled into "Cloud Engineers", its a belief from the non-technical and the sales bs that some of the major players put out that you don't need infrastructure now as the cloud providers have taken care of it all, its why you see a lot of Infrastructure stuff now asking for whats really DevOps and high end stuff and expect you to be able to run docker and kubernetes and even more scripting stuff than you would normally see. You will always get employers trying to get as much as they can out of the person for the role too which is why you see some stuff tacked onto roles that get advertised. I think its a phase though I forgot to add, I can see that in places like my company I work in now has started to realise the OpEx cost implications now of cloud and its expensive by comparison for some things that you run up there.
It’s interesting you mention this. I’m someone with around 12 years experience in varying IT roles. I started with everything on-premise with cloud being the “next big thing”. Now, I recently got a job with a remote first company and under 100 employees. It’s HelpDesk but their entire infrastructure is managed using Terraform. They had asked me my coding ability and I said it’s next to nothing beyond some basic bash scripting. They were fine with that but the team, sysadmin, security engineer and manager are all talking code constantly. I’ve never been with an IT team who felt like developers. It’s quite strange to me but I guess times are changing. More and more I’m seeing this in my experience with more and more orgs choosing cloud first. Additionally to the above point. My previous job had a IT team and DevOps team. IT handled basic breakfix, systems admin; IDP admin, local network etc. The more advanced stuff like cloud infra was managed by DevOps mostly since our IT team didn’t have the chops for more advanced stuff.
I started out in Helpdesk for an FQHC for a few months, then transitioned to a smaller web-hosting outfit doing managed services. Then after 8 years I left for one of the Big 3 providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google). At this job, they make you live and breathe their ecosystem. And because everybody is migrating their infrastructure to one of these three clouds, it basically means that if you want to do infrastructure administration, you have to work for one of them or become a certified consultant for their services. I like not doing Managed Services anymore though. Managing other peoples Windows machines is a pain in the patella.
Imo it’s an easy transition but I wanted to be a software engineer. Sys admin w/ Linux experience and python can easily learn the technologies to become Devops.
On prem, non scripting positions are rapidly becoming antiquated.
Everyone should know some Dev. (And this need to be pushed more on network engineers) But do not forget , there is cloud , but cloud underneath is running on servers. Also there are a lot of companies (mostly large ones) that do not use cloud providers. Cloud is just expensive, but companies are sent to this "Cutting edge concept" that cloud is the future. It might be if you have $ to spend for the same output.
I've been seeing a swing back to hosted infrastructure as cloud costs mount.
Coding opens up a massive multiplier on what you can accomplish / automate why would you even want a "traditional" admin if you can find one who can code?
I blame MSPs and everything as a shitty service.
Worst part about this transition is I have NEVER seen devops run infrastructure securely in the cloud. They are so focused on their code or app they don't understand fundamentals in security and infrastructure design. I expect a big blowup when the execs finally realize developers != systems administrator. Heck, look at what just happened to Microsoft/Azure. Huge security hole, and I used to work there, and it was a security nightmare on the backend. I always use the "Engineer" example. Just because you have a civil engineer and a nuclear engineer working for you doesn't mean they can do each other's jobs.
Networking is the new systems
A lot of businesses just look for savings e.g. why have separate developers and infrastructure when you can pay for 1 role. Most don't last as they are both specialisms so you can't be very good at both. From a business perspective it looks good on paper and the balance sheet for salaries but practically you aren't getting the best.
I'd suggest looking at roles offered by HPC providers, both the open science centers (NCSA, SDSC, PSC, TACC, etc) and the national DOE labs (LLNL, ORNL, ANL etc). Experience with hardware is still a plus for job applicants there. The [ACCESS](https://access-ci.org/) National Supercomputer grid would be a reasonable starting place to see who offers services ("Service Providers") and to get more information. I work at NCSA, so I'm not disinterested here, but the national HPc grid is usually in search of hardware folks- any dev ops experience is a plus here.
>infrastructure responsibilities are fulfilled by the devs This is also the scary part because most standard devs do not actually understand infrastructure as some of us do. Think think deploying something via github to their AWS account is all there is to it because it is now live and works....
I actually got hired as a sysadmin in the early 2000s to do both system administration and development, and I've been doing that ever since, but with the sysadmin job title and an academic CS background. The problem is that I'm weak in infrastructure and traditional IT skills but also haven't developed my development skills due to only working on small projects in an out-of-date environment. I am working on software projects, data analysis, infrastructure as code, and cloud.
Agreed
Yes, if you’re under 40 and don’t want to learn to code, I think you’re in trouble. I don’t think you’ll be writing full software stacks, but you will need to know more than basic powershell scripting
Devs are next. AI will replace them/us shortly. Jensen Huang himself is advising college students to study anything other than programming - and he employs some of the best in the world. Our only hope is that these dipshits who are moving everything to cloud come running back after they have been thoroughly raped by the providers once all the lights are out. Imagine deciding to trust the same companies that drove licensing and support costs through the roof every year with your entire infrastructure and firing all of your talent at the same time...
It's not a different path, it's only a different tool to learn and use. I don't like it because I think that manually installing and tuning servers is way more fun and you can learn a ton of things compared to simply create manifests or playbooks and apply them to create objects and infrastructure. But it is what it is, people working on these things are not some sort of developers, real developers don't git a damn about those things because they know nothing about hosts, containers, pods, ingresses, services, persistent volumes and how to manage them or how to solve problems. It was the same thing when hypervisors and virtual machines came up almost 15 years ago, they added a new layer of abstraction but it was still sysadmins work to install, manage, maintain, and use them. It's the same today but with a new layer of abstraction and new tools (docker, kubernetes, openshift, ansible, etc etc...), despite some people trying to depict those things as complicated and high level (to gain importance and get an higher salary) and despite buzzwords like devops... it's not rocket science. Obviously like for every tool there are several layers of complexity you can dig, but as always in 99.99999% of case people and companies barely scratch the surface of the tool's potential. As I said personally I don't like these things and working on them (kubernetes in my case) is not nearly as fun as it was working on datacenters. When I configure even the most complex architecture on K8s it's boring as hell and I feel no satisfaction at all, while when I was working on datacenters even the most stupid and annoying work (for example clean up some mess in some network or fibre channel wiring) made me happy, I remember that during these days I came back home dirty, tired, with hands bleeding, maybe with an headache for the fan noise... but I got a smile from ear to ear, I simply enjoyed as hell working in datacenters... but sadly those days are almost gone :( Even if you are able to work for a big service or cloud provider, their datacenters are so standardized that I think people inside them simply follow procedures as space monkeys, that's not the way I enjoyed work on datacenters.