Re: the sysadmin work, app developers have to worry a whole lot less about it, oftentimes not at all. In startups, that's a huge plus. I still remember servers going down because some workloads were destroying the RAID arrays s.t. that they were drawing down too much power and overloading the PDUs in their racks. I ended up having to hardwire the distribution of jobs to other servers while we (actually it was me, I was at a startup) got the PDUs upgraded by talking to a sysadmin on the phone. (Amusingly at some point we had to fix some DNS while restarting one of the boxes so I had to tell the guy what to do by dictating vi commands.)

But yeah it's like over time we ended up scaling the crappiness of software along with the software itself. At the same time, I'm inclined to believe that software development at large is in a much better position to solve a whole bunch of other problems than ever before. That keeps me motivated personally, though I get the frustrations for sure.