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Comment by Ruxbin1986 | Hacker News Reader

Ruxbin1986

There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux systems since the early 90s. It's not fancy as software development or drives business value but work that needs to be done.

The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work. The only thing left is actual software development.

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If you've tried to hire a good sys admin in North America you'd be shocked at how high their salaries are getting. Amazon is hiring them by the boatload. Shopify is moving to all cloud because they're unable to staff.

The problem is that junior sys admins aren't as useful as before to most startups. I still think they'll figure it out, but the industry is changing.

This. Competence is reducing per capita. The market is saturated with IT people who dont know what they are doing

The average competence is NOT reducing. What is reducing is demand for mediocre (and low) competence.

This trend results in less competent people flooding the job market.

But if demand for low competence people goes down, those people aren't learning on the job, therefore decreasing the average competence of the workforce.

...said every generation ever about the next generation.

Sysadmins used to be able to compile a kernel and some could even hack a kernel module together.

Today ? Not happening.

Another way to look at the trend - a lot of companies are moving to the cloud because they can't get the people to do it on their own.

Doing it on the cloud is now cheaper than doing it on their own. That could be because doing it on their own has got more expensive, but I suspect that the cloud becoming cheaper is a bigger factor.

So AWS is really Amazon's play to corner the market on sysadmins? That sounds remarkably plausible.

But isn't Amazon hiring similar people as Google SREs? So they are not really looking for sys admins but more of a full fledged programmers / dev ops people who can write software, not just bash scripts.

The author is referring to traditional system administration - this is Windows - SCCM, SCOM, Exchange, SharePoint, VMware Virtualization, Citrix, Networking, etc.

SRE or "DevOps" roles new roles that are similar to system administration but the biggest difference is the use of cloud technologies, automation and most importantly those in need to be or at least understand software develop and code.

"The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work."

It takes a hell of a lot of work to take a company's entire infrastructure and migrate it to Kubernetes and the Cloud, and then monitor and manage it. It's not trivial.

So the key is seeing your job as solving a business problem with computers, not "I administer Oracle version X.y.z running on Redhat Linux".

Not really. We now call systems administrators "devops engineers" now.

Just as webdevs are “full stack engineers” now

When my company puts out a rec for developers we get 300 applicants. When we try to get a devops, we get 3. It's tough.

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