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Comment by karlkatzke | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think there aren’t young people doing systems administration? Our last two hires in my most recent job were 23 and 27 respectively. Sure, they’re getting trained in the new hot cloud stuff... as the grumpy seniors figure it out first and set patterns... but they are still doing daily work with some rather ancient stuff.

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I'm not saying there are no young people doing sysadmin. What I'm trying to say is that if the new 'infrastructure' that all sysadmins learn is not an open UNIXy system where you can grok all the internals if you want to, but closed systems owned by 2-3 major cloud players, then we kinda maybe have a problem in 20 years?

Of course, one can argue that that will just cause a new wave of openness and the cycle continues.

My company seem to split responsibilities based on age. 40/50 year olds deal with oracle Linux, AIX and Solaris. Under 30's hires are more focused on cloud and mobile. We're all expected to have a footing in Windows and Oracle DB.

Yeah, and my point was that we start the young people that we hire on the open stuff. Then we move them up and on to the other open stuff, which runs on top of the cloud vendors.

(As almost everyone else points out, the closed cloud vendor stuff is nowhere near flexible enough for most moderately complicated use cases unless you’re running at serious scale.)

This is a false crisis.

As a "young" (30) sysadmin/devops dude I think that open, Unixy system is Kubernetes. I can take an application, dockerize it, write a helm chart and run it anywhere.

The risk is in treating anything as a black box, whether its a managed service or a container you pull from Dockerhub. It's something you'll get burned by eventually and need to learn from experience.

You setup and manage K8s and all the kernel tunings for the host systems so the NAT layers are optimized ?

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