Sysadmins in an org are there to stop you from doing things, not help you.

In fact in most companies this is always the case. They routinely lay off sysadmins, qa and other support personnel and ask developers to take over.

I'm now seeing trends of tech leads sort of roles doing the same jobs as a managers.

If your job involves some prime mover to which you are just a helper/enabler, its likely you can be easily eliminated.

Basically, we see exactly how it unfolds when a ransomware epidemic breaks out. Ransomware, in many ways tying people hands, such that an outage occurs.

In many areas, servers would chug along undisturbed. In other areas some of them would halt, either requiring input from some attended task, or because of a fault of some kind.

Two other considerations would remain variable, per specific scenario: remote sabotage in the form of zero days appearing in coordination with strike activities, or local on-prem sabotage, in the form of erased disk drives, unplugged cables, or physical damage however subtle.

The remote sabotage could involve a nation-state advanced persistent threat swooping in, or sympathy attacks from external groups which may or may not include those striking, to exacerbate the circumstances. Meanwhile on-prem monkey wrenching would have to occur immediately prior to a walk-out/lock-out.

So, pretty much the same disposition as any other strike, but with the added quirk of remote access, except any or all of the servers could theoretically run problem-free for the duration of the strike, and predicting which systems go down and when would almost always require insider knowlege to accurately estimate.

Meanwhile, everywhere this happens, people in need of a database would just do stuff in Excel, and snailmail USB sticks everwhere. Once that starts happening, it’s anybody’s game.