Ask HN: Whatever Happened to Sysadmins?

I got my start in this industry fifteen years ago at the ripe age of 14 as a summer intern in Akamai Technology's sysadmin department. After finishing college, moving countries, and waiting for a year to get my passport sorted out, I finally took a job as a Cloud Administrator -- and it struck me that I haven't seen anyone seriously trying to hire for a "System Administrator" in a looooooong time, even though I personally think starting as a sysadmin and now finally moving into a role as a software lead at my current org was instrumental in me building up not only the right skills but the right instincts to debug many kinds of problems.

To me the sysadmin role always felt analogous to an Apache scout or something, where one's deep knowledge of the computational terrain they inhabit is of primary importance; in other words it was the ultimate version of "the best solution is the one which requires the fewest lines of code" -- no need to roll by hand what `awk` or `systemd` or BSD jails or what have you can already do, much better, and in a much more thoroughly tested way than what you as an IC could do. Indeed to this day when I work with people who started on the sysadmin side and only later made the jump to SWE I find it easier to communicate with them because I know there's this shared scout sense we both possess.

What's the deal? I have my own theories as to the decline, but I'm curious to know your thoughts.