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Comment by chadr | Hacker News Reader

High quality sysadmins are evolving into what is called the devops role. Trouble shooting, scaling, architecting, and automating production systems are just a few areas where devops people shine. The cloud just provides them another set of tools to work with. It also frees them from dealing with the annoying/repetitive tasks (spinning a CD to install the OS, plugging in the network cables, etc) and allows them to focus on improving the application. A number of devops people I know can easily transition into developer roles when required. Summary: a great sysadmin should know how to code and does so in order to improve the app.

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Agreed, in manufacturing there are engineers that design the product (currently called developers) and there engineers that design the assembly line (currently called sysadmins).

When Toyota retools a factory, they don't have robots build/deploy the robots, there are engineers that "re-tool". This is exactly what is happening at Google/Facebook/Twitter, etc. There are maintenance guys, aka NOC monkeys, and there are engineers.

Eventually, everyone will need to be an engineer and that is where systems administration is going with the devops movement.

Here is a presentation I gave on it and you tell me if sysadmins are going away. http://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DevOps.pdf

DevOps! That’s a new terms for me and I love it! I'm a Systems Analyst by title but DevOPS better describes what I actually do. Aside from supporting implementation and configuration I'm also Project managing , QA and coding regularly to resolve the short comings of our system. I’ll be using this term more regularly.

It definitely sounds like you wear multiple hats at your job. Shoot me an email... I'm interested in hearing more about what you do.

That still feels like "sysadmins are being replaced by developers" to me

I think you're missing the point. Many developers don't know how to develop systems that will work well in production. At the same time, many sysadmins know only about the OS, hardware, and network. Great sysadmins are learning to combine the two skill sets. It's clearly a hybrid role and not a case of one replacing the other.

Only developers think sysadmins arent developers.

Conversely only sysadmins think sysadmins can code. A classic example is a close personal friend of mine who works as an sysadmin for an insurance company.

On two occasions I've had the unfortunate displeasure of working with him on web-related projects (we share similar hobbies and our local communities need web services of various kinds) his approach has been vile, Rube Goldbergesque concretions of Perl & shell scripts.

This is absolutely THE GUY I'd call if I needed some advanced logfile parsing in a hurry, but when it comes to actually developing web stuff the guy's totally in the dark. What's worse is his only metric is "It works and it makes sense to me" so he's content to make a complete hash of a development project.

During a recent conversation he admitted to having no real grasp on basic HTML and hadn't heard of CSS. The thing that kills me is he's convinced he's qualified to run websites for our local groups and absolutely refuses to accept input on the subject.

Oh well, the guy's also an ace whitewater kayaker and one of my favorite paddling buddies. Considering this guy will probably save me from drowning one day I can look past his failings as a "developer".

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