Hacker News Reader

Comment by bblb | Hacker News Reader

I work in IT Operations of a big IT house. 100% local gov customers. We fully manage around 5000 pet servers. ~30 sysadmins and some of us do architecture designing also. There's also a separate networking team of about 10 network specialists.

Senior sysadmins are really hard to come by today, not to mention someone who wants to do architecture also.

My hunch is that the 5000 onprem pet servers are not going away any day soon, because a massive amount of it is legacy systems that take a long time to migrate to cloud, if ever. Also the work stress is just ridiculous. So much stuff to do, even with automation. Only reason I still do this is that I like the "old school" tech stack vs. cloud IaaS/PaaS alternatives.

View on HN

>>Senior sysadmins are really hard to come by today, not to mention someone who wants to do architecture also.

I am not so sure... I am a well seasoned sysadmin, been doing server, network, architecture. I consider myself a solid linux/network expert and have managed datacenters. When I look for a new/more exciting job, or for a pay raise, all I see are "cloud, AWS, devops". I never see "old school" sysadmin jobs e.g. as you say, we have a room full of linux boxes and we manage them with ansible/scripts/etc, but we design and maintain them ourselves, come join our team".

You should learn some AWS and use it as a trojan horse to get those jobs. As a former old school sysadmin I really took to it because it's so modular and feels like Unix's "collection of simple tools piped together". Plus, any old school admin is a treasure on any cloud team because the need to drop to shell is unavoidable. People think they don't need sysadmins on cloud teams but behind every good cloud team are a few good sysadmins.

I want to use AWS without credit card, because I don't want to make a mistake ending up with 80K in debt. I will never forget that particular HN post.

> When I look for a new/more exciting job, or for a pay raise, all I see are "cloud, AWS, devops". I never see "old school" sysadmin jobs

Because the old school systems just chug alongg with a minimum of administration, while those newfangled cloud thingamajigs need tons of adminning...?

I mean, that's one interpretation of your (admittedly, anecdotal -- but that's what I see too. Lots of anecdotes sums up to:) data. A valid one, AFAICS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com