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Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

> quickly disappearing in favor of SaaS/PaaS solutions.

Remember that HN is a bubble and world is a much larger place :) No, it is not disappearing "quickly".

I'm located on the opposite side of the world with respect to Silicon Valley, and admin jobs are disappearing quickly here. This may surprise you but we have heard about this "cloud" thingy. ;-)

Ah yes, the magic cloud where you don't need to lift a finger and everything is safe and works and everybody is having a good time!

The only ways I have seen admin jobs disappearing is that they're renamed to "DevOps Engineer" or a company starts in a magic cloud with no admins and devs doing everything which more often than not turns into a dumpster fire and then they start searching for admins.

You may need less people to manage the cloud but someone certainly has to manage it. Unless someone has a specific responsibility to manage infra or someone personally cares about those things then things go unchecked, ports open to the internet that shouldn't be, no backups, etc., devs are usually concerned with making their app work and not those things.

And this isn't a knock on developers, there's only so much info you can retain and focus on so many things on a day to day basis that there's a need for people to specialize in certain areas.

This. DBAs are being replaced with a mix of Devops and Data Engineers.

SysAdmins are now called DevOps Engineers (or SREs), and that market is booming. It's all swings and roundabouts.

There are industries much slower to adapt new technologies right here in North America. The HN bubble is not just geographical.

But the question is, would you like to get a job at those companies relying on outdated processes where you take care of a pet server? Maybe even running on an old flavour of proprietary UNIX?

Almost no one has a job taking care of a pet server. They would be bored to tears when any decent sysadmin can take care of dozens to hundreds.

It's like every fashion fad in IT: stuff hits, everybody goes gaga over the toy examples until it's time to put it in production. Then they finally find out what kind of a dumpster trash fire the newfangled fashion fad is, and start looking at tried and true technologies. It's always the same.

Not really. The cloud won. So did microservices and NoSQL databases and containerization. The industry is not going back.

NoSQL didn’t win thankfully, relational databases are still the dominant technology.

Yeah, and everyone is trying to normalize their mongo schema. The only thing the cloud got us is faster provisioning, and perhaps greater reliability due to that. It didn't magically solve scalability and integrity.

Pretty sure we have a legacy product using MongoSB, but for certain processes we ETL stuff into SQL Server first.

I agree with the cloud and to some extent containerisation, however I don't think NoSQL and microservices "won". Over past couple of years I'm seeing a huge move away from NoSQL and renewed interest in SQL databases in general and Postgres in particular. The same with microservices. I've seen several projects that went all in on microservices a few years go slowly backing away from the approach, as well as newer projects that are being much more cautious with taking a micro service approach to their architecture.

And machine learning. And JavaScript/Python.

Things that win always do one of these:

- reduce complexity

- decrease friction

- improve results either qualitatively or quantitatively

SQL is not dead or dying by any means. Its just not the only kid on the block anymore.

Both at the former working place and the actual working place we use SQL as the major part of our data storage strategy for microservice based apps. We also use NoSQL but will never give up on SQL.

The web has been pretty successful too.

No they aren't, they are now labeled by HR as "devops".

Whilst the word quickly is subjective, I haven’t seen anyone roll out Oracle for about 15 years vs literally hundreds of Snowflake, Redshift, RDS, Elastic cloud deployments.

Maybe OLTP is moving to SaaS slower, but the on prem data warehouse market must be dying a death?

May I introduce you to Vodafone?

There is noSql solutions being built, but when I left a couple of years ago there were Oracle database backed projects in flight.

Some of the 3rd party applications supported PostGres so they didn't even need to stick with Oracle, but they did. It was when management pushed for a project to be Oracle back that caused a few of us to quit. It's nasty enough to develop on, I don't want to support too.

Yes there are very few Oracle rollouts but there are still plenty of on prem MySQL, PostgreSQL and MS SQL rollouts. Yes, there is a lot more cloud today, but I feel Oracle really is the product hit the hardest.

What you say also marks some direction: there are new and useful DB technologies to be learned.

Anyway, software world is built on DBs, whether they are administered by someone in the cloud or not.

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