I'm proudly 100% on prem Linux sys admin. There are not openings for my skills and they do not pay as well as whatever cloud hotness is "needed".
At the same time, the incredible complexity of the software infrastructure is making specialists more and more useless. To the point that almost every successful specialist out there is just some disguised generalist that decided to focus their presentation in a single area.
What?
I throw up in my mouth every time I see "full stack" in a job listing.
We got rid of roles... DBA's, QA teams, Sysadmins, then front and back end. Full Stack is the "webmaster" of the modern era. It might mean front and back end, it might mean sysadmin and DBA as well.
> We got rid of roles... DBA's, QA teams, Sysadmins, then front and back end.
On a first approximation, those roles were all wrong. If your people don't wear many of those hats at the same time, they won't be able to create software.
But yeah, we did get rid of roles. And still require people to be specialized to the point it's close to impossible to match the requirements of a random job.
As mentioned below, never labeled "full stack", never plan on it. "Generalist" is what my actual title became back in the mid 2000s. My career has been all over the place... the key is being stubborn when confronted with challenges and being able to scale up (mentally and sometimes physically) to meet the needs, when needed. And chill out when it's not.
Most AWS-only Ops engineers I know are making bank and in high demand, and Ops teams are always HUGE in terms of headcount outside of startups.
The "AWS is cheaper" thing is the biggest grift in our industry.
You can easily get your service up by asking claude code or whatever to just do it
It produces aws yaml that’s better than many devops people I’ve worked with. In other words, it absolutely should not be trusted with trivial tasks, but you could easily blow $100K’s per year for worse.
So I think for developers that have deep experience with systems LLMs are great -- I did a huge migration in a few weeks that probably would have taken many months or even half a year before. But I worry that people that don't really know what's going on will end up with a horrible mess of infra code.
The time difference between having a script ready has decreased dramatically in the last 3 years. The amount of problems when deploying the first time has also increased in the same period.
The difference between the ones who actually know what they're doing and the ones who don't is whether they will refactor and test.
After fully in cloud for sometimes, we’re moving to hybrid solutions. The upper management happy with costs and the cloud engineer had new toy's
2. niche, bespoke domain primarily occupied by companies looking to cut costs