If nothing else, it seems a lot more stressful to be “the guy” when the storage/network/other catches fire and you are the one to deal with the mess. People already expect software to fail all the time, and there are reasonable ways to rollback in an emergency. People are far less tolerant for infrastructure failures.

I recently noticed a job posted, for cloud and on prem. Likely, the goal being high compute/large datasets on site, cloud otherwise.

The primary focus of this purely infrastructure position, is a coding take home. Now, infra as code is part of local cloud, but there is sooooo much more to handle.

But because they have no idea how to handle infra, they seem stuck thinking it's just a dev job. Even while they hire stating it is not.

Quite sad. So much knowledge lost, that they don't even know what to look, what to hire for.

The amount of people who knew how to run on-prem hardware even 50 years ago was fleetingly small, we have literal schools and training pipelines to skill people to run on-prem systems. The salaries offered are enough of a carrot to attract a sizeable workforce that pays for most of the cost of this education. Paying this workforce is not a sufficient burden to make on-prem non-viable.

I've been hearing this "Cloud will DESTROY on-prem because on-prem skills don't exist and standardised cloud technologies make it easy to hire from anywhere across the world!" narrative for years which seems to deny the reality that we managed to train people to run datacenters just fine for decades even if people are snobbish about the riff-raff running things these days. Larger companies long ago figured out they could work with schools to develop a mutually beneficial training and employment pipeline. A lot of managers seem to be too lazy to do such things and find it easy to simply delude themselves into thinking cloud is always the best choice instead of contemplating doing hard work like that.