[-]

wooahstan@reddit

Yes, your colleague is kinda right

Traditional SysAdmins usually involve a lot of on-premise server monitoring, and tech support

Right now, since cloud has really transformed companies - we shifted towards monitoring it via cloud

We still do the server monitoring, and tech support - but they've added another thing in the mix which is DevOps which is important only for software development companies since you don't need a devops person to work on your company if your company is a paper making company

So they're kinda right, but also kinda wrong - i don't think sysad is going to be phased out, since i doubt people will hire "DevOps Engineer" if they're not specializing in Software Development

in the end, job titles dont matter

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quack_duck_code@reddit

Sounds like another case of "the professor that knew everything so they just couldn't make it in the real world and became a teacher."

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Sprucecaboose2@reddit

I've never seen titles in IT matter at all. Someone in HR is always going to hire IT dudes to make things work. I've been a network admin, system admin, help desk, etc, and it's all been "IT guy" to everyone else not in IT.

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potatobill_IV@reddit

This. No one knows what we do.

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bgatesIT@reddit

this is so true that they started outsourcing us to an msp and then the msp said sorry we can only do like 10% of this stuff. Company ignored everyone left, except me bc i have a car payment and nothing else lined up yet. Company realizes what they did, and trying to fix mistake without burning me out, turns into burning me out more and drawing our hiring people even longer bc dollaz and politics

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potatobill_IV@reddit

Ugh sorry

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bgatesIT@reddit

no worries itll all work out in the end...... right?....RIGHTTTTT?????? lmfao

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DK_Son@reddit

I don't even know what I do. And even if I did, I wouldn't tell ya!

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XCOMGrumble27@reddit

This hits a little too close to home.

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Savings_Art5944@reddit

I better google what I need to do....

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potatobill_IV@reddit

We don't either it's okay

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byte43@reddit

I barely know what I do some days.

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D1TAC@reddit

They don't even know sysadmin day exists. That's when you really know.

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potatobill_IV@reddit

I used to remind one of the companies I worked for...and they never did anything.

I left disgruntled 5 years ago.

I was the only one who knew everything.

After me and my coworker left.

I see now they show appreciation for the new guys on Facebook.

But they know jack shit from what I hear.

Everyone i see who still works there asks for me to come back.

They say everything is broken all the time and they don't know what they are doing.

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Weak_Wealth5399@reddit

Man i feel your pain. But it's best to just move on and focus on what where you are today and where you want to be in the future. Try being the best version of yourself and people around you will eventually see you glow. Leave the past behind you. You'll feel like a million bucks and most importantly be kind to yourself and everyone around you.

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potatobill_IV@reddit

Are we all like this. Just super nice and loving?

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Weak_Wealth5399@reddit

Why not? We're all stuck on this planet and not able to leave, just yet, so we might as well. Lol

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FruitGuy998@reddit

Majority of times that includes management too

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ExcitingTabletop@reddit

Part of the job is making sure management knows what you're doing and why. Not the technical details. Spending 20% of your time on break/fix, 80% on projects and here's the project list with rough timelines.

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

Part of the job is making sure management knows what you're doing and why.

Barely trust them to put on shoes. Sometimes its very beneficial to stiff-arm your boss from your workload and wait them out. Its rare but sometimes subverting them is just.... better...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-unspoken-truth-about-managing-geeks.html

Nails the whole vibe around it tbh.

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FlaccidRazor@reddit

Holy shit, I almost stopped reading after that totally unflattering first paragraph. But I didn't. It gets better.

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techretort@reddit

Majority of the time that includes me! I just fix the broken things

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crzyKHAN@reddit

Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams Book by Mickey Mantle and Ron Lichty

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Chunkycarl@reddit

I got to pick my title lol. You’re spot on though

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potatobill_IV@reddit

I went for an interview and was literally told they didn't understand my answer because they knew nothing about IT. They just trusted me.

I got the job because it was an elevated position at where I worked.

But still .......

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PasDeDeuxDeux@reddit

My goal is to get to in to position by retirement where I would know what's my title. Currently I just say what's the most appropriate for the situation. Some times I'm sysadmin, other times I'm devops, lately I've also been platform engineer. Cloud guy is also quite common.

I generally know what I'm going to do next week quite accurately (unless it's rotating internal support for our devs, then I'm anything between helpdesk to DBA or CDN expert), 4 weeks is quite a stretch. I have somewhat vague idea what I have completed before the end of the year.

Yea, titles doesn't really mean much when they aren't legally protected (doctors, structural engineers, pilots..) and I don't really see that changing any time soon. Or maybe we'll delve deeper to this abyss where titles are just something that payroll comes up with.

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Hjarg@reddit

Yes. Including ourselves.

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potatobill_IV@reddit

Only on backup Tuesday and update Wednesday.

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smiregal8472@reddit

What about rollout fryday? #NotATypo

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gscjj@reddit

They didn’t 10-20 years ago, they do now and why in larger orgs the do it all sysadmins don’t exist

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Ur-Best-Friend@reddit

And thank god for that.

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Professional_Hyena_9@reddit

I have been an it manager and doing things that would classify as a cio but it was all really sysadmin items

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Sprucecaboose2@reddit

Yup! Currently I'm an IT Manager as well, and I'm doing the same "if it's got power and/or looks like an electronic, it's IT" I have always done! Everything from figuring out new CNC machines because they are sorta computers now, to setting up and running the network, down to changing batteries out in remote controls, lol!

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Ur-Best-Friend@reddit

Oh but you're the IT manager, so you're also the one that gets to help the CEO digitally sign a document (for the 5th time this week). Frankly that should warrant at least a 40% increase in salary.

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HuckleberryOk8941@reddit

Our IT Director goes to the CEOs house to fix his Verizon Internet (family owned.)

SMH man.

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thatguyyoudontget@reddit

There cant be a better explanation than this.

"IT Guy" is all they need - designation wise they dont care, they want thing to work up and running. thats all.

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Kathryn_Cadbury@reddit

This is the reality of the situation. I've been a sys admin, Dev Ops Engineer, Systems Support Officer etc and the roles were almost all the same with just my title being different. Still look after server hardware and software and various applications, Do a bit of 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support etc, manage infrastructure upgrades pathways and recommendations, UAT, tech SOPS and the list goes on.

Most of us wear a hundred hats but we are seen by most as the IT person, regardless of if you are min wage triaging on a helpdesk or a technical architect on 6 figures.

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Ur-Best-Friend@reddit

My current role is "Independent IT officer" (well, that's the English translation of it anyways).

I have no idea what that means.

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ThemesOfMurderBears@reddit

I think that means you enforce IT Law.

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Ur-Best-Friend@reddit

Oh, that makes sense! Explains why they issued me a gun, too. Well I say gun, but you know how IT budgets are, pretty sure it's just a QR scanner.

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d3adc3II@reddit

Unless you work at an IT company and most people are ... IT guys lolz , then the there are roles and tasks for different titles lolz

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sdavidson901@reddit

Ive never related to a comment so much before. My title is technically “Network Administrator” but I also hand all of our companies infrastructure. But I’ve been asked to fix things out of my scope like images on our website, things on other peoples website, and the coffee machine (because if it gets electricity it falls under IT right?)

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mkmrproper@reddit

It matters when HR based on the titles to lock down your salary range.

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Sprucecaboose2@reddit

Oh yeah. I don't care what you call me, but you gotta pay me proper!

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sybrwookie@reddit

I've volunteered to be referred to as junior assistant janitor, as long as I get a raise

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Tetha@reddit

From what I see at work, it's indeed wrong to focus on titles. It's more important to focus on technologies and skills and how they contribute to the stack.

I mean sure, at work I live in a world of thousands of dynamically scheduled containers, build pipelines, largely cattle as servers and such. And it's effective and good for the company.

But at the end of the day, you need some grunts around who know their linux, their linux networking stack, their networking. I've had good devs who know their linux paint themself into a corner on some build servers and they needed someone to save the day. Or who have a good idea how to manage and deal with hardware, because hardware isn't just a docker run dell-poweredge.

If you build your career and your skillset on the idea of being the lord and master of a few bespoke systems with arcane configurations like 20-30 years ago, yeah, that's on it's way out. Being an expert at some of the lower-level components like HV, virtualization, OS, network? Absolutely not. A lot of larger container fleets are using modern network security as the basis for their container security, and it's not trivial.

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dg_riverhawk@reddit

exactly why I dont put some fancy title on my email signature. I just use IT Dept. or nothing at all.

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Witte-666@reddit

On my previous job, my application was rejected by management because "my profile wasn't what they were looking for" while I checked all the required boxes. A few days later, they called me back, telling me they made a big mistake and almost begged me to come in for an interview where I instantly landed the job. Later, i heard from the temporary sysadmin who worked there at the time that he accidentally saw my c.v. on the desk of the manager and asked him why he hadn't called me because I was exactly the right person for the job. The thing was he had no idea what a sys- or networkadmin was. He didn't see "IT," so he thought I wasn't the right guy for the job

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Sprucecaboose2@reddit

Yup! For the longest time, I was a Network Administrator. As the only IT guy in a company with like a couple switches total. I just went by IT Guy until I got a helper, now I'm IT Manager lol.

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smiregal8472@reddit

120% confirmed.

In fact even i myself have no idea what my job title could be (if i even have one [a title, not a job; a job i have, but a job title?] o.O)...

Therefore i prefer to betitle myself as "IT-voodo-wizard of category 5 or higher".

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PhilosophyBitter7875@reddit

Sometimes you can even add in 'Cyber' to you title for fun.

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methpartysupplies@reddit

Yep this is exactly how it works. Do I know the difference between a dentist and orthodontist? Nope. But when my teeth hurt I just want someone to fix it.

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evilkasper@reddit

Concur.

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Ok-Juggernaut-4698@reddit

Yup. Been that way for years. I've somehow now landed in an IT Specialist Role where I'm doing network administration, server work, desktop support, planning, installs, etc.

Knowing your shit and doing a good job matters in IT, because people don't know what we do.

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Toneth89@reddit

I would argue that job titles do matter since no one knows what the difference is. It will very much help you progress your career especially when job hunting.

However, I agree that within the company, your job title doesn't matter. You're just "IT".

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11_forty_4@reddit

Yeah, I feel this

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Leucippus1@reddit

The most useless 'application support' or 'devops' or 'cloud engineer' you can imagine is one that doesn't know how computers work. Sadly, I am seeing the effects of the gold rush to cloud on the quality of the young engineer we are getting. Maybe the traditional sys admin role is dying, I don't know, I certainly spend way more of my time conversing with developers and software architects than I used to, knowing how a browser hosts an application and how that app interacts with the local system is crucial knowledge - one people like me have an instinct for because we have been sysadmins for years. It is hard to diagnose things like race conditions and memory leaks if you have never experienced troubleshooting them on regular old computers.

The title is 'systems', not 'operating systems' or 'server' administrators. That system may be a set of containerized applications.

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shifty_1981@reddit

I have been doing system administration for 25 years. Started while going to college. I think the comments that system administrators will always be needed is a little short sighted.

We still need people to rack servers and run cables but companies for very few of them today vs when I started. We still need hard drives replaced and patches done but it's so much easier today it needs less people.

The question I have asked myself during my career which has done very well for me is: What should are growing in demand and which are shrinking?

4 years ago VMware was still the biggest private supervisor company and plenty of jobs at companies managing it. Not so much today after the Broadcom disaster.

New companies are not starting on premise. They are starting in the cloud. If anything in system administration Cloud Management is growing. IT security is the hottest area with the biggest shortage.

I wanted two things from my career that I saw so few every talk about: skills that allowed me to move elsewhere if needed (layoffs, toxic coworkers or environment, family situation needs, financial hurdles) and work life balance. I mean plenty wanted these things but free did anything to achieve and maintain them. Most just stayed put becoming depressed, cruising or crossing their fingers they kept their jobs. I refused to put my future in the hands of upper management.

My suggestion to anyone in administration, especially young people is: look at how the industry is changing and don't ask if there will be people needed for that work. All of there will be a growing demand for them and will you be able to another your life goals doing it.

Today I work remotely for a high quality of life company and they allow me to build my skills in ways that both interest me and ensure I have skills for tomorrow. They pay me well and the rest of our team and they raise we are humans not robots. They are leaders in the global IT community (for real) and my work is always changing so I love it.

I don't think traditional system administrators will be as in demand in the future. I think AI and cloud will make them less and less.

You might land a job that is where you work your whole career but every job I envisioned that happening ended up changing dramatically in 3-5 years that didn't suit my goals so I left.

Layoffs Transitioning us to project managers and outsourcing infrastructure. Toxic employees that don't get fired Toxic management that runs everyone into the ground. Need a bigger raise than 2-3% to support my family. Bored and mundane Little vacation and no remote, but have a growing family.

You name it.

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shifty_1981@reddit

So a bunch of autocorrect issues above. Fixed.

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Consistent-Slice-893@reddit

I wouldn't say the Sysadmin is going anywhere. DevOps on the other hand is- Lots of programmers are getting replaced with AI. Chat GPT and MS Copilot turn out powershell scripts that work without any modification at least 75% of the time right now if you ask the question right. I suspect that it's the same for programming languages.

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Gishky@reddit

They can try. But sysadmin is not dying.
If they hire devs for sysadmins that's their problem. They will have to learn how to do everything and once they can, they are sysadmins.
The job is not replaceable dw

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1337Chef@reddit

Lol

Yes, DevOps will solve it all Yes, Servers never have issues Yes, Applications on servers never have issues Yes, AI will replace everyone /s

SysAdmin may change (and have changed), but it will always be needed. Keep updating your skills and you are fine

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MonkeyManWhee@reddit

ai won't, but this CEO magazine retardation of pushing everything to the cloud regardless of fit might.

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inertiapixel@reddit

managing cloud is as much work as on-prem Im finding (not SaaS).

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masheduppotato@reddit

Your message is spot on, your choice of wording is not.

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MonkeyManWhee@reddit

Sorry! CIO magazine level of retardation.

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placated@reddit

This sentiment right here is why the sysadmin role is dying. Instead of embracing and learning about how new technologies can help, we tend to complain about anything that doesn’t let us physically hug our servers.

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MonkeyManWhee@reddit

What's new about someone else hosting your infrastructure?

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chaoslord@reddit

They do it (at least in Canada) for tax reasons - cloud infra is an operating expense, because it's a monthly charge. On premise infra is a capital expense, and companies in poor operating positions want OpEx not CapEx for tax and market position reasons.

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Different-Hyena-8724@reddit

Capex saves your ass during recessions. Because you are still writing shit off as a loss that you paid for in prior years lowering your tax liability. Opex also gives you a tax writeoff, but at the tradeoff of eroding your desperately needed cash on hand.

To me this is like having a spouse lose a job and then going out to rent them a car so you can write off the rental charges.

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zrad603@reddit

taxes fuck up everything

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ProfessionalITShark@reddit

The whole reason accounting came to be is because of taxes.

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19610taw3@reddit

In a lot of orgs, management just works bonus cycle to bonus cycle. No long term planning .

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19610taw3@reddit

Same in the US. Then they find out their tax savings don't offset the higher costs. And lack of support.

We just had one of our business units offload something to the cloud against our recommendations. Suddenly new cloud service is having a lot of problems.

The applications team reached out to us to troubleshoot. Sorry - we have exactly zero access to this. We can't help you at all until you request us creds. And even at that, we don't control anything on it and at most , all we can do is look at statuses.

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techretort@reddit

It would be great if DevSecSysOps would hurry up and make me obsolete. If probably wrangle a pay rise to do the same thing.

I'd add that the daily jobs also include dealing with people who think you can solve the problem, but at best you can point them to someone more specialised. Or trying to explain why what they just asked for is the dumbest thing you've heard without jumping off the nearest tall building

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slickeddie@reddit

That last point…lmao. I moved to be a Linux admin a year and a half ago and the amount of times I’m asked to make the permissions of a folder 777 still boggles my mind. Among other dumb things.

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tonyyarusso@reddit

I’ve had applications people recursively chmod 777 from / . Yep, that’s what backups are for… (And yet they wonder why we keep harping about reducing their administrative privileges.)

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btcraig@reddit

777 permissions and add all users to the admin group. Make sure to set sudo to NOPASSWD too because it's annoying to have to authenticate too often.

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TheIncarnated@reddit

I have a fucking developer mad that they have to enter a password when they install something to windows "Well at my last place, this wasn't the case and it interrupts my creative flow."

Well I have to enter it multiple times a day for administrative tasks and don't lose mine, so idc? - i said in a much nicer way but I wanted to say that so bad...

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GSimos@reddit

Tell him that they are lucky to be able to install themselves their applications ;-)

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TheIncarnated@reddit

I'm actually about to remove it from them and give them a VM that I can redeploy whenever

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GSimos@reddit

Isolated I presume from your production infra?

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TheIncarnated@reddit

Absolutely. You presume correct

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GSimos@reddit

gif

Perfect!

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LowerAd830@reddit

THIS. This makes me want to strangle people daily. Aw, too bad that you have to have a seperate administrator account. and no, you cannot use the administrator account to log in and do your work. Why? Security. and we monitor for this. FAFO Mister teeny dev Man

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Junior_Drama@reddit

Just add them to the wheel group and the let the circus run free

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GSimos@reddit

Yeah, because who will hack a linux box? Who? No one, it's impregnable.....

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slickeddie@reddit

Thankfully our SUDO access was moved to Active Directory groups so I don’t touch it. People still ask me for it, I just tell them to talk to IAM.

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malikto44@reddit

I started using setfacl for this, and until I use words identical to "It allows for Windows permissions on Linux", users completely get lost of how a user can access a directory, even if their user and group isn't displayed by a ls.

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coinplz@reddit

The entire idea of having servers is pretty dated and they’ll continue being phased out quickly.

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pausethelogic@reddit

Ideally in a modern infrastructure world, especially in the cloud with containers and managed services, there aren’t servers or VMs to manage anymore. Since I started working with AWS years ago my goal is to never have to touch an OS or VM if I can avoid it

In that way, traditional sysadmin roles are going away in favor of IaC, cloud services, and software engineering (which DevOps is a subset of)

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mnvoronin@reddit

And what do you think all the containers and managed services run on?

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pausethelogic@reddit

That’s the thing, with cloud services like AWS’s ECS Fargate or Lambda, I don’t care

I just need to care that it’s Linux, and I have the appropriate amount of RAM and CPU allocated for whatever is running

The sysadmin job isn’t going away, it’s just changing. There are still plenty of traditional on prem windows shops out there hiring sysadmins

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mnvoronin@reddit

That’s the thing, with cloud services like AWS’s ECS Fargate or Lambda, I don’t care

That only means you are not in charge of the infra.

Sysadmin job is not even changing, it's just shifting. Instead of managing infra on-prem, you pay for some other sysadmin to manage infra in remote datacentre.

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pausethelogic@reddit

Except with public cloud providers like AWS, sysadmins aren’t managing the underlying infrastructure. It’s software engineers who work on the service teams, and most of it is all automated

Most of those companies also eat their own dogfood so there are AWS services built on other AWS services on the backend

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chaoslord@reddit

And developers are the worst set of users, because they know ALMOST NOTHING about how computers work, basically just as much as is needed to do their work. You'll be fine. Skillset might change but that's it.

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BigLoveForNoodles@reddit

I‘ve kinda run the gamut of IT roles in my career - I’m one of those devops guys who has spent as many years on the ops side as the dev, and… man, I hate how right you are about this.

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uptimefordays@reddit

Devs are the professional equivalent of gamers, they know enough to be dangerous but aren’t interested in actually learning how operating systems or networks work because they’re only interested in their specific interests.

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Aromatic-Coconut-122@reddit

Haha. That's a great analogy, especially seeing PC and PC parts prices skyrocketing while some gamer showcases his latest build... And can't explain why he picked the part he picked.

Now I'm a gamer, a former cop, a lightweight programmer, a system admin, a physical security subet matter expert, former CCNP, and so much more making me a minority of typical users, so this analogy got me laughing pretty good. Our company senior system admim, who was bumped up to a VP last year was just laid off because the company is moving to cloud. They laid off the entire server team, half of deskside support, for a company with about 5k staff spread out across the US and UK, they figured on network engineer was sufficient.

But... We haven't migrated the servers, and now there's no one to do it, we don't have the bandwidth to run everything from cloud services, but one network engineer to replace some 2,000 switches, firewalls, and routing equipment, and configure it all.

All because the mindset of those at executive levels just thinks computer just works.

I have seven monitors on my desk connected to two eGPUs. I was asked if "All those computers were necessary" and " we could reallocate those computers to others so we don't have to buy them new ones"

There's two problems, immediately apparent. That person's an idiot and should be ordering lunch let alone computers and two, it's one computer driving everything. What wasn't apparent is everything is MINE except the computer!

Yay for 'puters!

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GSimos@reddit

I like that and I'm steeling it :)

gif

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MrPipboy3000@reddit

I hate when they ask for a VM with 128gb of ram when its a rebuild of an app that looking through the current server, has never used more than 8gb even at its busiest ...

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sollux_@reddit

The manager of our dev team, who is the VP of IT, once said to me when referring to a laptop that was purchased for a graphical design artist who was complaining of lag:

"There shouldn't be any difference between integrated graphics and dedicated graphics, RAM is RAM"

I couldn't even respond I didn't know how to reply without seeming rude or condescending. Its worse than just not knowing anything, they actually believe they do know everything lol.

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DerpinHurps959@reddit

A little knowledge is more dangerous than none at all.

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Falconpunch7272@reddit

Its worse than just not knowing anything, they actually believe they do know everything lol.

"Weaponized incompetence".

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GSimos@reddit

Well, you could use an analogy of a normal vs a racing car, they're both cars but built for different use. If I understood correctly his reference to shared memory (which dedicated GPUs don't need or require as they have their own very fast RAM).

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leksluthah@reddit

\^This right here. I once assumed developers knew lots about an operating system, since they wrote code on it. NO. They are as clueless as any other user, but they have far more dangerous tools. With them, I have to worry about malware PLUS whatever they can do to their own machines out of ignorance.

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LowerAd830@reddit

Yeah. at EVERY standup, the developers say "I had problems with my computer this morning. I had to reboot for updates" Dumbass, that is what the snooze is for. Yes we have patch management, but you can snooze it until you are ready to reboot.

And those are not computer issues that keep you from doing your ones and zeros. its incompetency.

Yes, I has a sys admin,/Desktop/admin/network/admin/security admin. application admin have to sit in on Standup calls with Devops.

Systems Administration isnt going away, you just need to wear more hats.

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FieryFuchsiaFox@reddit

I'm a hobbist computer gal with a home lab using Linux for fun alongside professional uses as a previous statistican, who made the move into software development, I have been SHOCKED how little actual hardware or general PC knowedge developers have. Im in the minority for just being able to build my own PC. 🤯🤯🤯

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Qade@reddit

It's not that unusual. Authors often don't know how books are made, published, marketed, promoted or sold. They just write content much like developers do.

That said, there are race car drivers who know their car inside and out and can help the crew maintain and adjust the car until it outperforms expectations... and there's those drivers who just drive the car to and beyond its limits no matter where those limits may be or how they got there.

We prefer the drivers to know something about the car... but not too much or they start telling us how to do our job.

That said, devops can cover both pretty well if you want to work with infrastructure yet still build and create something with your mind.

Automation absolutely does remove much of the need for sysadmins to update permissions, deploy updates, even configuring storage and network. We do it all with ease today. Someone needs to create and maintain all that, but it's not a sysadmin job anymore.

Someone will still need to swap out dead drives, but the role, and pay, of sysadmins will continue to take a back seat to more advanced career paths.

Don't despair tho... I tend to hire the ones with home labs in their basements to become the next devops and infrastructure engineers.

sysadmin is a great place to spend the first 5-10 years.... then another decade in devops... then another 10 being the one you said you'd never become... in charge of other people.

Then retire and start a lawncare business to keep busy or something.

[-]

punkwalrus@reddit

Same. It's not just not knowing, but not CARING to know. Years ago, I had a developer who kept opening tickets asking "what IP is this hostname" or "what hostname has this IP?" After about 6 of those, I sent along a screenshot of "nslookup" to be helpful. That fucker actually complained to my boss.

"That's not my job. That's his job. I don't have time to do all his grunt work."

Yet, he had time to wait half a day for a P5 ticket in our helpdesk queue for something he could do in seconds. Sysadmin work was beneath him. Blew my mind, that mentality.

[-]

BrokenByEpicor@reddit

Can confirm; Work with developers.

They're lovely people, some of my favorite in the company. But they do not know their computers that well.

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Hot-Chemistry3770@reddit

Lol fucking preach

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Fair_Bookkeeper_1899@reddit

I super disagree. The industry is moving to immutable infrastructure which is a paradigm shift from what most SMB admins on this sub do for a living. Yes, the traditional systems admin is pretty much dead at this point other than SMBs who are just shifting everything to SaaS apps. The entire infrastructure at a modem shop is defined in code, and the admins are software engineers as well who are focused on infrastructure code.

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Crafty_Dog_4226@reddit

And, compliance takes care of itself too.

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Conscious_Ad_4085@reddit

Compliance.. the topic were it feels like everyone is cheating and lying except our company.

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timbotheny26@reddit

If anything, I feel like the hardware/infrastructure support side of things is safer from AI than other fields. Computers can't fix themselves, and if they are ever able to do that, then every job is in trouble.

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libben@reddit

Ahem. Future is now old man! Skynet is comming!

https://x.com/Tesla_Optimus/status/1922456791549427867

https://x.com/Tesla_Optimus/status/1925047336256078302

https://x.com/KeystonePress1/status/1923900394150768670/photo/1

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Maelkothian@reddit

Are those still on remote control?

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Ok-Juggernaut-4698@reddit

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Another Muskrat vaporware project

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Ashamed-Ad4508@reddit

Can't trust it to change jumper before bending the pins

Hell.. we cant even plugin the jumpers for Mobo power-hdd-spkr-etc without --triple checking--

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Regular_Strategy_501@reddit

And boy is that thing gonna have a field day if it ever tries to do anything in a messy server room. Wym it can't access the switch because there are cables in the way?

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SwertiaRadiata@reddit

It's not like robots are coming...

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DocHollidaysPistols@reddit

AI will be running sfc /scannow and rebooting

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coolbeaner12@reddit

bUt WiNdOwS hAs A tRoUbLeShOoTeR

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ceantuco@reddit

hahaha

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joshtheadmin@reddit

A couple weeks ago I asked ChatGPT for help with fortiswitch commands. I spoonfed it the switch model, the software version, you know pretty much did the work, and it gave me the wrong commands.

AI is hot dog shit right now. It can give you a framework for a solution and a competent engineer needs to implement. In my career and lifetime should I worry? Maybe, but not worried about the garbage out there right now.

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fractalfocuser@reddit

Me who just solved a user lockout in 20min because I was both able to interpet the logs/symptoms immediately and perfectly guide the user through their end: "yeah I'd say my job is pretty safe"

I love ChadGPT but acting like AI is going to out perform me in any near term future is blatantly wrong. 75% of my job is knowing what people mean when they themselves don't.

Not to mention of the 25% remaining only 10% of it is simple enough for an LLM to do. The other 15% is stringing together various subject areas into integrated solutions and my buddy Chad sucks at it, I know because I constantly have to ask my old friend Google when Chad fails me.

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Aggravating_Refuse89@reddit

ChadGPT. Lol at that. Maybe the next will be giga Chad gpt.

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Consistent_Photo_248@reddit

Yup DevOps all the way. Companies that dont have developers still have DevOps without the dev. But it's called systems operations. And you administer the systems to make sure they are operational. 😁

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clickx3@reddit

I remember the day my MSP got called from a company 3 months after they fired all IT. They thought Meraki and devops would make sysadmins obsolete. I made so much money from them fixing all their problems. Then, they asked me to help hire a new IT staff.

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ceantuco@reddit

how do you keep your skills up date? I remember when I was starting I would go home and learn new things but now the last thing I want to do when I get home is more IT stuff. lol it is a struggle.

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gscjj@reddit

To OPs point, in a round about way I think you confirmed what OP is saying. Traditional sysadmins tasks are going away or "changing" as you put it.

More than half of what I did 10 years ago configuring OS with Ansible, building templates with Packer, helping fix "server issues" are now just application pipelines to build a container that runs on a minimal OS or deployed to Kubernetes.

In smaller developer driven environment, all of that is what you'd expect DevOps to do.

The application support I was doing is being handled by senior tier 2 people.

Most of the trivial "server issues" are handled by off-shore teams.

I mostly handle the hypervisor, storage which is now mostly one and the same where I was managing large separate data environments, and what's left of the older systems that haven't been rebuilt on Kubernetes or to pipeline deployments.

Sysadmins will always exist but they are a shell of what they were 10-20 years ago when it comes to responsibilities.

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jamesaepp@reddit

Great addition. Another consideration I think gets left out of this and I have to constantly bring up when we get vendor visits:

I live in the Canadian prairies. Income is relatively low atop living in a LCOL area.

I don't make six figures. I easily could if I moved to a Mountain View CA or Seattle WA or Austin TX or w/e.

License costs don't give a damn where I am 99% of the time. A $100,000 automation investment has a significantly different ROI in my socio-economic area than it does in the previous examples.

That is where a lot of the pushback to automation comes from. It is too damn expensive sometimes.

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anxiousinfotech@reddit

I make a decent living cleaning up the mess DevOps typically leaves in its wake. While I'm sure there's plenty of actually competent DevOps teams out there, I've only ever encountered disasters of epic proportions.

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yanksman88@reddit

I'm technically a Network Administrator but I do many many other things not network related.

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tonyyarusso@reddit

“The workload for system administrators is not consistently demanding—most of the heavy lifting occurs during major projects such as system builds, installations, or server integrations. Day-to-day tasks are generally limited to routine requests like increasing storage or memory.”

The stuff you listed as “major projects” are our day-to-day tasks. We build and decommission whole servers more often than we increase storage or memory on them (although we do that too). The time in between any user/customer demands is when we can work on OUR projects - administrative integrations, automation, cleanup, process modernization, etc. There are some shifts to more DevOps-y stuff, but they’re very limited in our organization - we have HARD org chart lines between “application” and “infrastructure” lines (as in, the app people pay us monthly rates internally for supplying infrastructure), so while collaboration happens to some degree, there’s definitely not like a “full stack guy”.

Some of this is a matter of organization size. In my case, it’s state government. “IT” alone is some two thousand employees. There are 9 of us just for Linux server OS level work. Windows server is a couple dozen. Virtualization hypervisors are another whole team, as is networking, as is DNS, as is datacenter facilities management.

What “sysadmin” means is certainly always changing. We do a lot more automation orchestration and public cloud configuration and a lot less cabling and fiddling with hardware than ten or twenty years ago. I certainly don’t see it “dying” or becoming “obsolete” though. Overconfident developers who got a little too DevOps happy without knowing anything about the Ops part will always break things, and we’ll always be around to help unbreak them and tell them to not do that again. ;)

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Dave_A480@reddit

The number of jobs for a basic 'I know bash & PowerShell, plus some (Ansible, puppet, chef)' is minimal. And they don't pay what they used to.

The money is in being a developer who can also sysadmin these days... Not in being a pure ops guy.

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Xaneph_Official@reddit

Hmm...I think there are a couple of extremes and everything in-betweens. I'm a Sr SysAdmin at a Manufacturing plant with 400 employees.

Roughly 200 have laptops, all have accounts.
security system badges/cameras
active directory
SCCM/MCM/Intune
Teams phones/rooms
Fileshares
3 bare metal hosts VMware with 55 VMs (mix of Win/Linux)
5 Sans, 10 LUNs
Veeam/Wasabi
TIG stack with tons of TVs and digital signage
1 server room with 6 4-posts floor to ceiling, 5 auxiliary network closets, 16 IDF'S, hundreds of combined APs/switches.

I'm the DBA, Network Admin, Sysadmin, IT Director, Project Manager, Technical Writer etc etc

I've worked some SaaS IT roles that were frankly B.S. jobs. And I've worked some jobs like this one where it's a much bigger sandbox to play and build in.

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hkeycurrentuser@reddit

The dude has drunk too much vendor crap.

You know what I'm seeing. DevOps is struggling. Devs don't want to do Ops.

Devs are creators, they invent, build, make. Tending and maintaining is a different passion.

Different people. Different passions. Different skills.

Just my 2c

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OmenVi@reddit

That's why the best devops come from the ops side.

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MegaByte59@reddit

If you wanna work for any of the major corporations google Facebook Microsoft, Coinbase, uber, Airbnb, etc, you won’t find normal sysadmin roles at all. They want terraform, ci/cd pip line experience, Jenkins, infrastructure as code.. so he’s right in that sense. Still I see plenty of normal sysadmin and network admin roles too but the really interesting companies they don’t seem to offer it.

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TigwithIT@reddit

DevOps are awesome. Just the fact most don't know common networking and other facets. Imagine a developer going network engineer on his first day thinking he can just spin it up when a corporate firewall locally plummets and switches bork. Call it what you will, the local guy will always be needed in one way or another.

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Coffee4AllFoodGroups@reddit

I’ve been hearing that for the whole 40 years I’ve been in computers. It still hasn’t happened.

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Deemer15@reddit

Lead sysadmin here in the 150k range in the Midwest. My role is in the O365/Intune/Azure space. None of this is going anywhere anytime soon.

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ohfucknotthisagain@reddit

Automation is how you survive in this field.

No big company will be paying you to RDP into servers and patch them one at a time. Maybe a small mom-and-pop shop... if they're not hosted in the cloud.

Someone will pay you a decent salary to maintain their server farm with configuration management tools---SCCM, Ansible, Chocolatey, Puppet, etc.---or in-house scripts/tools.

If you have a home lab, trial some tools and learn a scripting language or two.

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ParaStudent@reddit

Prior to AI I would have agreed with this to some extent, the traditional Sys admin role was moving towards devops.

Now a lot of companies are moving back to on prem when the cloud bills bite and are needing Sys admins again and AI is slowly killing devops off.

If AI continues to increase at the pace its going at then things like terraform, ansible and the like could well be automated completely by people that have no technical knowledge at all.

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PurpleAd3935@reddit

I can tell you for my experience,each site of over 150-200 people need at least 1 admin ,no matter what happens,yes have get super advanced but the users are more stupid than ever , including the new generation.

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kagato87@reddit

Colleagues have been saying that for at least...

(Looks at a calendar. Holy crap 2025 already?)

At least 30 years that I have first hand experience with.

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FlaccidRazor@reddit

All IT is dying, you can just use Google and AI to fix everything. /s

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bjorn918@reddit

This is the dumbest take I’ve heard in a while. White collar workers your typical pencil pushers will be replaced faster than IT roles especially any AI related roles.

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siclox@reddit

It's dying the same way exchange administrators are dying out.

Are all exchange administrators out of work? No, but you'll find fewer opportunities compared to the past.

What to do?

Skill up horizontally: learn new products, services

Skill up vertically: learn how to build new systems and services based off business requirements

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Forsaken-Discount154@reddit

I think people get System Administration confused with traditional on-premise AD ecosystems. All the title really means is that you administer a system. Whether that system is in your server room, a co-location, the cloud, or even a SaaS; you’re still administering a system, so you’re still a System Administrator.

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Expensive-Rhubarb267@reddit

Not dying, just changing & rebranding. If you compare a list of 'Systems Administrator' jobs from today & 10 years ago. Sure, there will have been more back then. But job titles don't matter that much. There are still many tech related jobs.

The point & click GUI jockey type Sysadmin role is dying a death & rightfully so. Infrastructure as Code & automation/Cloud skills are becoming more important. But you'll always need those hand-on administration/troubleshooting skills. I've yet to meet anyone from a development background that is anything like as good at troubleshooting as someone with some Sysadmin skills under there belt.

No AI probably isn't going to take your job. & if it does it'll be slowly.

Plus, AI fundamentally means 'more IT'. Not less. So there will be IT jobs in the future.

Job market for IT is super weird now for many reasons. We've had 'cloud-first' become 'cloud when it suits us'.

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Fair_Bookkeeper_1899@reddit

IaC was important 10 years ago. If you still don’t do that you’re far behind and won’t get hired anywhere worth working for.

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cmack@reddit

Government worker? re: cloud first

Not hating, just sounds familiar. Where I feel cloud has always been 'when it suits'

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Expensive-Rhubarb267@reddit

Bit of both- just mentioned it to highlight that things are complicated at the moment. Not clear if we've hit 'peak cloud' or now is just a lull before we all get rid of on-prem in 5 years.

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doalwa@reddit

Been hearing this for the better part of 20 years now…first it was the cloud, now it’s devops…yet, somehow I never find myself with less worth to do, quite the opposite.

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DeadOnToilet@reddit

You aren’t going to get a decent unbiased opinion in the subreddit dedicated to sysadmins but I’m say the hard truth: Yes, the traditional sysadmin role is very much a legacy position. Still viable in many companies, especially those with older tech stacks.

My organization is a global F200. We dumped sysadmins in favor of devops, cloud and SRE roles. Anyone who didn’t want to adjust their skills and work within that structure was let go. That was almost seven years ago now, and most of our competition and other companies we regularly work for and with are at some stage of going through that same process.

Those here who belittle the DevOps methodology are simply trying to protect their own current jobs from modernization and that’s entirely understandable.

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88captain88@reddit

Just retitle to AI sysadmin and you can double your pay for the same role

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Arkrus@reddit

Sysadmins need to learn scripting and automation, that'll be enough to call yourselves DevOps in a lot or org's eyes.

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JustSomeGuy556@reddit

Devops is a very specific job... "Development operations". Conflating that with normal sysadmin jobs is common, but deeply mistaken.

In most environments, there's always major projects. And on top of that endless security fixes, upgrades, migrations, etc. that will keep a sysadmin quite busy. Yes, it's somewhat inconsistent in terms of workload, but it always has been... this is not new.

The line between "application administration" and "sysadmin" is, to say the least, blurry... But it's my general view that if you have the skills to do one, it's pretty easy to do the other... and at a lot of places it's the same job.

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Fallingdamage@reddit

Your colleague doesnt know what a sysadmin is then.

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sneesnoosnake@reddit

There is a weird push from the fringes to turn desktop administration into code... basically MDM as code... the problem is this only makes things easier at massive scale, potentially. For most small to medium size companies this is actually a distraction.

Managing Windows? Everything is a Graph API call I guess. The idea seems to be, who needs to document when you've got GitHub. I think this a bit myopic.

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anm767@reddit

I think your colleague is right. With everything in the cloud, servers don't really break to the point where you need to fix them 24/7. The only down time we had was when someone dug up the cable and took the whole area offline. Most of the time at my work is spent developing solutions that improve the business. You only get paid more if the business is making more money.

Obviously, this is only applicable if you want more than a base salary. You might want the minimum and keep your head down. Because people want different things you will get different responses.

Communication skills > technical. You can log a ticket, fix it, call it a day. Or you can talk to the people, figure out why tickets happen, what is slowing them down, use your technical skills to come up with long term solutions which improve the business. There is a great series - The Profit, guy goes around helps businesses to make a profit.

Usually managers do not speak technical, and technical people do not speak manager. If you have technical skills and can speak manager, find solutions and deliver them, you pay bracket just doubled. It really comes down to what you want - solve tickets hoping no one talks to you, or lead and make things happen.

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rololinux@reddit

I see devops getting replaced by A.I before sysadmin is my hot take.

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dethandtaxes@reddit

Good news! DevOps won't be getting replaced by AI anytime soon because AI is absolutely terrible at an operations mindset and it's also really poor at troubleshooting. So as an old SysAdmin now DevOps Engineer, I think we're safe for awhile.

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Felielf@reddit

What even is the difference between sysadmin and DevOps Engineer?

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IM_A_MUFFIN@reddit

DevOps Engineer means you know how to use some type of provisioning framework like Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet, etc. Sysadmin means you can tell the DevOps Engineer what should go into the playbooks for the provisioning framework. In my experience, a Sysadmin can do DevOps, but not every DevOps can do Sysadmin work. But as the other person noted, there’s functionally no difference in what’s needed from a knowledge standpoint.

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Automatic_Nebula_239@reddit

Any good ideas on learning enough to get into devops from a sysadmin stance? I'm a Linux sysadmin and manage a 300+ server cloud environment via ansible (for config management, patching, and application deployment mostly).

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IM_A_MUFFIN@reddit

I mean, it sounds like you’re already doing it. Is there something specific you’re looking to do? Presumably you’ve got monitoring/alerting/etc lined up already given the scope of your setup, but that’s all sysadmin stuff. DevOps (to me) has always just been about automation (deploys and upgrades) and scale (adding hosts when there’s load, self-healing when a host goes down, etc).

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blue_trauma@reddit

How do you manage your ansible code base?

Spin up a gitlab instance and host the ansible repo there, figure out how to get a pipleline going doing a basic lint test on any commit.

That'd be a good start.

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blue_trauma@reddit

Technically when youre maintaining the operations side of a software development team, you become DevOps.

But the devops mindset (infrastructure as code etc) has bled in to the general Sysadmin role so in my mind Devops is just another name for Sysadmin.

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fakehalo@reddit

Developers who maintain the operations of where their code runs.

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cmack@reddit

nothing.

Fun-fact though.

Devs who were once sysadmins are better devs.
Sysadmins who were once devs....not so much generally speaking.

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Ok-Juggernaut-4698@reddit

There is a noticeable advantage when you start your career hands on vs fresh out of college with a shiny new MacBook Pro and no experience in the trenches.

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kilkor@reddit

I’m a devops engineer and came up through the ops side more than the dev side. i have an entirely different take. I think your “awhile” is a handful of years. The role itself won’t go away entirely for “awhile”, but the 4 or 5 colleagues you might work with are going to be trimmed down to a single person that has the best understanding of the current gaps that you’re talking about. It will be entirely driven by the business side doing the same thing they’ve done for 2-3 decades now, which is demanding that the IT budget be reduced since they’re seeing all these businesses around them claiming downsizing from the adoption of AI. It’s either adapt and survive or get outsourced to a company that has already adapted.

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Lucky_Foam@reddit

Trimming down to a single person will not work.

What happens if they get sick? Or go on vacation? Or needs to step away for a few hours for a doctors appointment? Or gets burnt out being the only person working and they just don't come in anymore?

There will need to be people to back fill and cover.

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PrincipleExciting457@reddit

Most companies don’t do that now. What makes you think that will change?

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XxSoulHackxX@reddit

Tell that to the place I work. Businesses don't care. They just want to cut costs. IT is their favorite place to do so partly because their licenses for things cost so much

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Lucky_Foam@reddit

That's how all businesses work. It's a cycle. It will come back around eventually.

Manager: We don't need IT, cut the staff and budget.

Something breaks.

Manager: We need to fix all this broken stuff. Nothing works around here. This is effecting our end product.

Hires more people and spends more money.

Manager: We don't need IT, cut the staff and budget.

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XxSoulHackxX@reddit

That is how it normally works. Place i am currently at has just doubled down on outsourcing. Jumping from company to company. 3-5 years, business usually hits a breaking point and starts hiring people back. Not the case here.

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Ur-Best-Friend@reddit

The role itself won’t go away entirely for “awhile”, but the 4 or 5 colleagues you might work with are going to be trimmed down to a single person that has the best understanding of the current gaps that you’re talking about.

aUntil that single person quits 6 months later because they're doing the job of 3 people, and then the company has to hire 3 more people to replace them, and the company's systems are a buggy mess for the next 5 years because no one knows why things are set up the way they are, but whenever anyone tries to change them, something seemingly unrelated breaks.

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Ok-Juggernaut-4698@reddit

I've been playing around with AI and I find it to be pretty dumb when it comes to many things, especially troubleshooting.

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GeologistPutrid2657@reddit

i think we'll all ride off into the sunset simultaneously with ai hand in hand.

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cmack@reddit

this right here. hot take is right take.

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nastynate0079@reddit

Ooo I’m stealing this hot take

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Bogus1989@reddit

what does your friend do?

hes wrong.

i dont know of a job called general sysadmin.

the names just changed.

as an app analyst…it will help tremendously, if you know how that app actually works on the backend…what i mean, troubleshooting it will become immensely easier if youve built and ran that software from scratch before…

with any role in IT.

i think its completely dumb as hell when someone doesnt know how their infrastructure and systems work below it.

my friend who now consults and has a contract currently for FCA( Stellantis, Dodge, ETC) Fhey hired his firm to tell them where they suck and why.

Now how did my friends get this positions? well he was a master mechanic younger in his life…then he moved on to programming the sensors and diagnostics with the computers in the vehicles, and also built a whole company around that.

Do you think he would he worth a damn starting out just doing diagnostics?

nah. not at all. he learned bottom to top.

Also i helped him build his IT department…firstly by teaching him ground up, one thing at a time while his company grew. There came a time I became irrelevant when he was asking me azure questions. He went from self hosting a few vms and hosts…to building it all in azure, to migrating the entirety of it all in there..

Now sometimes its fine…programming is a beast… only so much time on this earth….

but here I am, I found the fix for your software program…and I am not a developer, just a determined administrator of your software….

and I lose you mid conversation because you dont know how this infrastructure works…when its common knowledge to everyone else.

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Skyobliwind@reddit

The opposite is what I experience atm. Yes the big projects are what produces the most work, but the amount of projects is just increasing massively atm. From everything security related to everthing ai related. That all needs to be set up from scratch starting with hardware, setting up high availability and so on. Depending on what you define/are as a sysadmin those projects are huge and ofc the run in parallel to the daily business...

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rahvintzu@reddit

Is your colleague a dev?

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Deadsnake99@reddit (OP)

no, his position is team lead application support.

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Anticept@reddit

There are still industries where legacy tech makes sense, and "the death of sysadmins" isn't in sight in those.

Overall though, it's a pretty fundamental shift away from configuring systems individually, and more about configuration using code. That means things like ansible, powershell scripts, RMM tools... etc.

In addition, SOMEONE has to maintain the iron that cloud providers have.

Sometimes you can't just run the script that blows away a malfunctioning system and re-spin it up. I'm sure some cloud app guy will say "it's a shit application then it should have 45 layers of load balancing and redundancy that can tolerate asteroid strikes!" You don't always get the convenience of that kind of load balancing and redundancy though, you get whatever the budget says you do.

But, they're not wrong in one aspect: cloud applications are the current hotness, and whichever path you take, you can greatly increase your marketability if you can learn the low level AND the high level.

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GeneMoody-Action1@reddit

\^This, tech is great, but someone has to keep the tech running.
Config admins are nothing new, been around for decades, and if I had an extra dollar for every time I was brought in to determine what was wrong, BY an IT team, well I would buy a boat.

Just because someone knows how to get a thing unboxed and setup, does NOT mean they understand how it works and what to do when it malfunctions in ways they do not understand.

When I meet a cloud engineer that knows little to nothing about how computers even work, only how to get setups prepared to specifications. I fear Ai replacing them, not me.

The whole "I did not just charge you $250 per hour 1h minimum because of the ten minutes to get something back online. I charged that for the knowledge I had, your team didn't, and you needed that. I was just the package it was delivered in."

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walks-beneath-treees@reddit

> In addition, SOMEONE has to maintain the bare metal that cloud providers have.

Nah, man, the CEOs are correct and chatGPT will maintain itself. Any day now

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ZombiePrefontaine@reddit

Ahh. That explains it. He's just jealous because you're aspiring for something more challenging. He decided to come up with some fairy tale to make himself feel better about giving up on his aspirations and he wants you to give up on your aspirations to validate his complacency.

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mallet17@reddit

Ahhh explains everything :p

Next time the app goes down, don't respond to requests to check the underlying OS/host.

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alexisdelg@reddit

Devops/platform/sre will also check the os/host

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surveysaysno@reddit

App team: "URGENT! We are seeing slow processing times please check disk is slow" Sysadmin: "have you checked your app logs?" App team: "we will after our morning meeting, please check the system ASAP"

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hafhdrn@reddit

"I thought our field was dying, dude."

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javiers@reddit

So he is confidently ignorant.

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BasementMillennial@reddit

This says everything.

Hes gaslighting you. Probably doesn't want you to leave.

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icedcougar@reddit

… not sure you have to listen to lead-helpdesk-only-knows-one-app guy

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moffetts9001@reddit

The workload for system administrators is not consistently demanding—most of the heavy lifting occurs during major projects such as system builds, installations, or server integrations. Day-to-day tasks are generally limited to routine requests like increasing storage or memory.

I'm sorry, but your "colleague" is a dimwit.

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CoolNefariousness668@reddit

Wish it was dying, I think I’ve had one of the busiest years I can remember.

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Mercuryhawk21@reddit

Couldnt agree more. Business technology solver for sure. You are expected to know a ton of different technologies including items you have not seen or touched yet. You need to have the ability to adapt to problems and think on your feet.

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CoolNefariousness668@reddit

Yes… it’s exhausting. I am basically a generalist for everything… but it does award me some autonomy, and that’s pretty good.

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dukandricka@reddit

Traditional system administration is becoming obsolete, with a shift toward DevOps.

My response to this is the same one I've given people for the past 15 years (around the time the dumb term came into existence):

You can take a systems administrator and teach them how to code + work on webshit. End result: developer who understands infrastructure and who also understands relationship between what their code does and the underlying system (read: kernel, syscall, userland) and can usually troubleshoot these things (or at least narrow it down to the specific piece)
You can take a webshit dev and try to teach them systems administration. End result: doofus who thinks everything should be in Docker containers, "sudo" should be put at the front of every command, yet still has no knowledge of the entire "stack" from kernel to application

The term "DevOps" is a crappy term for a) webshit people who think they're sysadmins because they know how to install a Linux distro, and/or b) managers who want to try and make sysadmins wear not just multiple hats, but ALL the hats.

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stromm@reddit

Your first statement is not fact because you use an absolute (can).

I have been a sysadmin (a real one not what most who post here use it to mean) for more than thirty years.

And I SUCK at coding. Like it causes headaches when I even think about doing it. It’s why I got into sales/service, then hardware/software support, then OS/servers, then network/security.

I can plagiarize code and usually piecemeal things together. But I can’t even write more than very simple batch files or BASIC code. I can debug it, just not create it.

And I know a LOT of people like me.

I’ve found that most people who are good or better at coding are horrible at other IT things.

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gruntbuggly@reddit

Your colleague is only partly right.

For one, not every company that has "systems" does "development". So there are still lots of places that hire sysadmins, and do not do any kind of devops. There are a lot of companies who leverage some aspects of devops in their system administration practices, like Infrastructure-as-Code, with tools like Ansible/Chef/Puppet. There are also a lot of companies that do not adopt these practices and still do traditional system administration.

The workload is what it has always been. You're going to be very busy sometimes, and not so busy other times, and that's how it's been since I started as a sysadmin in the 1990s. We use the quiet times to iterate on improvements to processes so the busier times go smoother.

There are companies that are completely unvirtualized. Where every compute resource is provisioned by hand, every printer is configured by hand, etc., etc. You'd be shocked by the number, I assure you. Those companies function pretty much the same today as they did 10 years ago, as they did 10 years before that.

There are other companies that are fully virtualized. Where the only physical infrastructure is thin-clients and network switches connecting users to cloud resources. In those companies, your colleague is correct that things have changed significantly. Resources are defined in code, deployed in code, and reclaimed in code.

That's a long way of saying, it's an evolution, and there are still plenty of traditional sysadmin roles out there.

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RenderBroken@reddit

Honestly it is partially true. Now sysadmin are being split up into Application Admins, and Infrastructure Admins. Infrastructure admins are closer to the normal sysadmins, just not managing applications.

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Maelkothian@reddit

A rose by any other name...

The buzzword of the year is platform engineering, building an environment where consumers of compute and storage can instantly provision through self service portals and DevOps and automation take care of the rest.

Those platforms need to be built and maintained (everyone is always really surprised when their private cloud runs out of capacity) and the 'golden paths' are nice but never really what people actually need so they need just a sliiiigght adjustment.

And of course it ignores the fact that the people building the applications usually have no clue about how the underlying infrastructure works out how to troubleshoot it when it doesn't, let alone how to optimise it so their application actually performed without horrendously over-provisioning the resources.

So yeah, classic sysadmin is going the way of the dodo, long live the platform engineer with the exact same skillset 😀

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DehydratedButTired@reddit

Sounds like a DevOps consultant. This makes sense in someplace like Google or Netflix. Most IT is not run like this. Sysadmin still exists, DevOps isn’t that hard to add on to your sysadmin knowledge. When you know the tech, you know the tech.

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jdptechnc@reddit

If he is talking about Windows clickops (what many people mean when they mean "traditional"), then yeah, that is already being offshored or outsourced to MSPs if it can't go offshore.

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jmizrahi@reddit

As far as the market is concerned, sysadmin died as a role a decade ago. In reality, devops is just fancy sysadmin with a little extra git... Don't get hung up on terminology.

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zatset@reddit

What do you mean by "SysAdmin"? Define it. Because at my current role I am... -Network engineer -Systems administrator -Application support -Database support ...maintain networks..DB, Terminal, File and Active Directory servers...Virtual machines, automation and scripting, inventory...integrations with other software...solve software incompatibilites, debug and troubleshoot... I call myself SysAdmin, though.. But honestly... Some call those entirely different roles..

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antihippy@reddit

You forgot technical architect, system designer, psychotherapist...

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zatset@reddit

So...I honestly don't know what any of the titles in the IT nowadays actually mean....
But I don't think that what is under the umbrella of my description of SysAdmin...is obsolete.

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antihippy@reddit

I agree.

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Edhellas@reddit

In my last role it involved a lot of security, monitoring, and some automation.

The landscape will keep changing, just go with the flow.

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DaemosDaen@reddit

I'm in this post and I don't like it.

You forgot Light weight web developer.

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zatset@reddit

I...forgot...not only that...but much more.. because exhaustive list is impossible to be created..

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MammothBreakfast4142@reddit

Shit yeah, when writing a resume I don’t have enough storage to write down all the roles I’m responsible for as a SysAdmin.

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PotatoOfDestiny@reddit

devops is just sysadmin with scripts

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ahmadjavedaj@reddit

Asked my colleague (software develeoper)for the IP of the server he wanted me to monitor. He said 127.0.0.1

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S4LTYSgt@reddit

I actually am experiencing this shift. I am not sure if this is true for every organization. But I recently got kicked off of a role because the org wanted more DevOps people. I am a traditional SysAdmin. I started off in IT Help Desk, Network Engineering, then Systems Engineering and then Sys Admin. I know Linux, Windows and Networking. I dont know how to code, I dont know a single coding language. I barely know Powershell scripting mainly because Ive always been able to google/chatgpt it. I dont know kubernetes. Idk it seems like every sys admin or infrastructure engineer role ive applied to requires you to know developer, hardware, cyber knowledge. Its as if they want a whole team in one engineer. And those roles are being filed so im started to feel the worst case of imposter syndrome lol

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ZombiePrefontaine@reddit

Lmfao. We're so busy I'm my sysadmin department. Is your colleague a sys admin?? What the fuck do they know

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techchic07@reddit

I was going to say the same thing. I’m a Sys admin. Some days I’m so busy I barely have time to take a bathroom break. Hahaha

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ZombiePrefontaine@reddit

I never take a lunch break. I just bring my lunch to my desk and eat while I knock out a few lower level tickets

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Remindmewhen1234@reddit

Worked at a fortune 50 insurance company, that moved to AWS.

They had a need to deploy IAAS Domain Controllers. Devs said they could do this easily, which they found they couldn't easily do.

I finished the promotion, for a month everything was great. Middle of one night got arrested that the DCs were down.

Devs treated them like cattle and not pets for some reason. Dumbasses

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Odd-Sun7447@reddit

LEGACY sysadmin work is dying. He's not wrong. Understand, this isn't a new phenomenon. Back when virtualization came out, it revolutionized the industry the same as Infrastructure as Code is doing now.

Gone are the days when even major organizations are going to be building and configuring servers, more and more are moving to a DevOps style infrastructure lifecycle process.

As far as sysadmin work in general...nah bro...apps are still going to have problems, your DevOps guys are going to misconfigure stuff, and you'll need to figure out how they did it wrong, so you can tell them how to make it right (or update the code yourself).

This is a standard part of the evolution of IT work. IT is a field in which you must never stop learning. If you do, your skill set will be obsolete in 8 years.

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EnhancedEddie@reddit

This was a big argument on twitter the other day. Sounds like he’s just regurgitating everyone’s opinion from that thread.

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Lurtzae@reddit

Titles don't matter much, but as we're all just human interfaces for computers it should be pretty easy to replace our jobs with ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

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Hefty-Possibility625@reddit

The beauty of information services is that there are a lot of services that branch out of it. Systems administration and DevOps are only two of those branches and neither are "going away". It's important to realize though that each company may not use the textbook definition of what those titles mean in their job postings, and in life there is a lot of flexibility when defining someone's job.

It sounds like you are trying to figure out what trajectory your career should go in. I would ask yourself what you enjoy about your current role and what you would like to do more of.

Which parts of your current role do you enjoy the most? (e.g., solving problems, automating tasks, working with users, managing systems)
Do you prefer working on short-term fixes or long-term projects?
How do you feel about scripting or coding? Do you enjoy it, tolerate it, or avoid it?
Do you enjoy digging into infrastructure details, or do you prefer working closer to software and business processes?
How comfortable are you with learning new tools and platforms on your own?
Are you more energized by hands-on technical work or by planning, coordinating, or improving processes?

Depending on how you answer these questions, you may find that you are interested in other career paths:

Systems Administrator Focus on maintaining servers, user access, updates, and troubleshooting. Good for those who enjoy stability, documentation, and supporting infrastructure.
DevOps Engineer Involves automation, CI/CD pipelines, and bridging development and operations. Good fit if they enjoy scripting, solving infrastructure problems, and improving deployment processes.
Cloud Engineer Specializes in deploying and managing resources in cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP. A natural step if they enjoy infrastructure work and want to go beyond on-prem systems.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) A mix of software engineering and systems administration with a focus on reliability, performance, and monitoring. Strong scripting skills and systems thinking are essential.
IT Automation Engineer Focuses on automating repetitive IT tasks using tools like PowerShell, Ansible, or Python. Good for someone who enjoys scripting and streamlining operations.
Business Systems Analyst A more user-facing role involving analysis of systems and business needs. Suitable if they enjoy working with end users, solving business problems, and improving workflows.
Security Analyst (or Engineer) For those interested in securing systems, reviewing logs, and learning about threats. Often overlaps with sysadmin experience and offers strong long-term growth.

Whatever career path you decide to pursue, be competent. You don't have to be the smartest, fastest, or most creative person on your team, you just have to be the one that gets shit done. Figure out what drives you and try to steer your career towards that.

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Hefty-Possibility625@reddit

Final piece of advice from my long-winded comment, learn a scripting language like Python or PowerShell. No matter what role you are in, it is INVALUABLE to be able to automate your own work, and it can help you do things that other may not be able to do.

Even simple things like: I need to get this information out of this app and into this other one is trivial and could mean eliminating the need for manual data entry that eats up FTE.

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DarthJarJar242@reddit

Traditional system administration is becoming obsolete, with a shift toward DevOps.

He's flat out wrong. Some of what used to be called system administration has split off to be called Dev Ops but System administrators do more than just administrator the physical hardware.

I have a team of 12 guys that report to me all with some variation of the 'systems Engineer' title. We do everything. Building the physical systems, managing the vms, controlling and managing the cloud environments, anything you can think of that is IT related but isn't DBA, Network, or DevOps related is handled by my team. We're the biggest group under the CITO.

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Chimniore@reddit

This is why schools for IT is not rly a thing. U can learn the basics and alot of the theroy, but the more years u get in the job, the more u spesify to different things, brands, softwares, hardware, solutions etc. I've seen colleagues to change the field just bc they don't want to be constantly learning. If ya like problem solving, and self improvement, and generally u r interested din tech. This is ur field.

I ended up in to an "IT school" as I they offered me a free laptop if I graduate. I thought to my self, well I kinda need a new one and idk, did not have any direction in life. Went to the school, was disgusted of how little the teachers knew, went to China as exchange student, came back and got a trainee position, necessary to graduate, learned how stupid normal ppl are with tech, graduated with higheat grades. Got hired by the same company I was a trainee at and been there for the past 10 years.

We were 15 ppl when I started, and I've played many roles and I still play many roles in the firm. We are now over a 100 employees and the field has changed drastically from when I started. But it is still interesting and I love it. But no school could teach the things I do. Even I don't know half the time what I am doing xD.

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latchkeylessons@reddit

I've been hearing that since the 90's about systems roles, desktop roles, software engineering, etc. It obviously never materializes to the point that jobs go away. There are fluctuations in the job market always, like we see now, but the career as whole? Never. It means the collapse of society. Chaos Theory demands our work exist, if anyone wants to go down the philosophical rabbit trails.

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lmow@reddit

Sysadmin became DevOps, which became SRE, which is now I don't even know what.
Point is it's the same job, different toolkit and title.
We traded BASH scripts for Ansible.
That's a generalization, but you get the idea.

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solution661@reddit

Sysadmin isn’t going anywhere but it does change as time goes on. When I was a kid in high school in the 90s the SysAdmins at my school were doing board level repair on the school’s computers and peripherals on top of their other tasks. By the time i graduated college in the early 2000s, their role change quite a bit, no longer doing repair by switching to an RMA process. In enterprise environments my role as a SysAdmin was very compartmentalized. When i transitioned to working with small to medium businesses as an independent consultant, being a SysAdmin meant being a One Man Army. In my experience only enterprise environments know or care about DevOps.

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Southpaw018@reddit

This field is always changing. Always. There will, for the far foreseeable future, be a need for a sysadmin role or one like it. If it’s something you enjoy, go for it. You can always use related experience to gain a desired role in the industry. You’ll never be siloed off into one job description if you don’t allow it to happen to you.

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HumbleSpend8716@reddit

He is correct. Focus on code when possible. Never do the same thing twice.

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sleepthetablet@reddit

This same thinking was around 10 years ago, soooooo, idk, everything changes and everything stays the same ya know

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diito_ditto@reddit

Sysadmin as a job title is dying, 100%. The traditional ways of managing systems isn't a marketable skill any more as gitops is the norm now and you automate everything.

That said the real skills you need to be a sysadmin, the ability to adapt/learn new tech/skills, and a broad experience and knowledge on a wide range of tools and tech.... all directly apply to DevOps, platform engineering, etc. You many not use Linux systems management or networking skills very often in DevOps for example, but it will come up at some point and there will be, often younger, people who only know cloud and you'll have an advantage.

Don't get fixated on the title. I just consider myself a tech guy who tries to stay current with the latest in demand skills. Whatever title I get for doing that doesn't matter much other than marketing when it comes time for the next role.

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Zamboni4201@reddit

Your colleague is generalizing.

There are a considerable number of DevOps people who know very little about the underlying HostOS, and networking, storage, and security infrastructure.

There are always going to be roles that support those things.

DevOps people tend to have coding experience. They facilitate a CI/CD workflow, the build/test processes. Promoting artifacts. Monitoring and troubleshooting complex chains of processes.
Pouring thru logs, keeping automation running.

But when they have underlying issues with the big three I mentioned above, they often need more expertise. Storage, networking, and security are difficult to do well… for everything.

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Ivy1974@reddit

Yeah right. When AI takes over our job is when humans will be wiped off the face of the earth.

gif

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CoolNefariousness668@reddit

I think most companies haven’t even realised the cluster fuck of work that needs to be done to be remotely ‘AI’ ready at this point. The IT consultancy cheques will continue to be written.

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Zortrax_br@reddit

If you friend said that, he doesn't know what devops is and what sysadmin are responsible for.

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techw1z@reddit

your colleague is a moron and probably things that serverless means we will have no more servers in the future and datacenters will disappear.

DevOps is just a small subset of SysAdmin. DevOps might not be able to take on the hat of a sysadmin, but the other way it's usually pretty easy.

also, you are a moron too if you think it makes sense to describe yourself with a single term, or maybe you just need to get more experience before surpassing that point.

I just call myself whatever I think the customers want.

Security Consultant, System Administrator, DevOps Admin, Network Admin.

Because as a true Sysadmin, I can actually do all these things.

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Certain-Community438@reddit

People who currently work as sysadmins are probably well advised to learn Dev(Sec)Ops, and use it where they can BUT have no real reason to fear their career path is dead, even if they don't do that.

But those who've lost their jobs to automation, offshoring - or those like you - would probably be better just focusing on Dev(Sec)Ops. In either case you've got knowledge that can be built on.

It's definitely not going away, but the opportunities will be shrinking over time, and the supply of available, experienced sysadmins will go up in "Western" countries.

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dreadpiratewombat@reddit

In the same way that mainframes have been dying for the last 20 years…

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timbotheny26@reddit

Meanwhile the IBM mainframe in the back room:

HOR HOR HOR, KNEEL BEFORE ME PUNY SYSTEMS!

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Different-Hyena-8724@reddit

And here is your $120k per quarter maintenance invoice.

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Bad_Idea_Hat@reddit

"I have to talk to it in arcane words and phrases. It hates the cloud mages. But it does its job well, so we keep it around."

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timbotheny26@reddit

Praise the Omnissiah.

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Ok-Juggernaut-4698@reddit

Let's be realistic, the IBM systems like AS/400 and MacPac were mainly database driven systems. Processing power only mattered when you had a lot of users.

We currently run one of those systems and can't wait to get away from it because it's so limited.

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timbotheny26@reddit

The joke was about their size more than their processing power; they're big, heavy and loud.

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rswwalker@reddit

A lot of the old mainframes were used for their containerization, so multiple applications/services can run in parallel but segregated from one another on a single system. Often written in Cobol or Fortran these were workhorses that still work to this day!

The modern equivalent to these would be Kubernetes clusters.

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Ok-Juggernaut-4698@reddit

Yup...gotta backup the AS/400 this weekend.

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gowithflow192@reddit

People thought that a few years ago but your colleague is stupid. Cloud has actually strengthened sysadmin. It is strong as ever in the windows server enterprise space, especially middleware.

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Xzenor@reddit

Your colleague is just not good enough for the interesting projects it seems

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deZbrownT@reddit

Yeah, guess what, PHP is dead also!

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spoohne@reddit

‘Doubt’

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Fratm@reddit

Devops is just another title that means systems administrator. Most sysadmins do everything under the devops job description anyways. At least that's how I see it.

Sysadmins are a jack of all trades, they will never go away, we do too much.

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EMCSysAdmin@reddit

I recently picked up a job as a Systems Administrator. While you are less likely to find a "Systems Administrator" job title at larger corporations, you will find the same required skill sets in roles like: Azure Administrator and Support Engineer.

I can also tell you that my new role as a Systems Administrator also came with development work. Several small VB.Net applications have been written and need to be maintained. It has also been discussed to move these application from VB to Python. While maintaining and upgrading systems, I'm also a code maintainer.

My previous role was DevOps Engineer. In DevOps I really didn't touch system issues at all. I worked to automate the deployment of systems and their configurations. If the OS is what you are after, then DevOps more than likely isn't what you are looking for either.

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EEU884@reddit

Job titles and responsibilities don't really mesh anymore.

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Successful-Head-736@reddit

Yes it’s dying. It’s coal jobs but 10 times worse and faster. And even worse is we don’t have any political backing.

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Working_Astronaut864@reddit

We still do all the things we used to do. Now we also take on M365 Change Management as a fulltime position. Again, the cloud hasn't reduced any workload by the amount that it created in the first place. I'll die on this hill.

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neveralone59@reddit

If you work for a software company this is mostly true. Sysadmins use and expand devops tooling and the role becomes devops. In other businesses (particularly small and medium ones) sysadmin roles are still prevalent

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cbass377@reddit

"Traditional system administration is becoming obsolete, with a shift toward DevOps." Give a developer root and that doesn't make them a sysadmin, no matter how smart they think they are. Send a sysadmin to $language training and it doesn't make them a developer no matter how smart they are. Development and OPs have two fundamentally different goals. OPs wants the environment to be stable, Dev wants to add new stuff to the environment. So DevOps is more about building a team whose skill mix is at a desired point on the continuum in my mind.

"The workload for system administrators is not consistently demanding—most of the heavy lifting occurs during major projects such as system builds, installations, or server integrations." There are so many projects that require heavy lifting, if I blew off every meeting for the next 3 years, new projects stopped, and worked 12 hour days, I might actually get done with the current backlog. But right now a team is having some fantastic idea ("Just needs 1 server, what's the big deal?" or more storage "Best buy has 1TB drives for $9.99, why are your quoting us $5,000?") that needs to be fully req'ed out and built, that this heavy lifting will never stop.

Day-to-day tasks are generally limited to routine requests like increasing storage or memory. Users want to login and print. Accounting wants to link excel sheets 20 deep. Cyber wants every device in the MDM. Auditors want screenshots. Executives want their butts kissed. Marketing wants some new non-standard device because they lost the "Sexiest laptop on the table" contest at their last meeting with a consulting firm. Payables wants their postage printer connected to the network. Compliance wants every process documented. HR wants 20 new hires onboarded by tomorrow. Leases need to be renewed on the production printers.

Each of these points could be its own job, Each with its own title. But as long as leadership is too lazy to make a decision about the details, Sysadmins will abide.

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Marathon2021@reddit

LOL.

DevOps simply started as nice branding for "we [developers] don't want to have to wait on others, depend on others, let anyone else have a say in what we're doing" which honestly was always there ... but when you needed any more CPU cycles than what your personal laptop could muster you had to go talk to the people in charge of the fancy glass room, and then a whole bunch of governance and scrutiny came into play.

And then ... cloud happened. Shortcut around any / all governance and scrutiny. But ... we need a trendy name for it. How about DevOps?

And thus, a movement was born where your average- to even moderately-capable Java developer ... suddenly thought they understood networking and routing as well as a 10-year Cisco certified CCIE working in infrastructure/ops... thought they understand security as well as a CISSP certified professional in the CISO's office.

Nope, nope, and nope.

But acting like spoiled, entitled children this didn't stop them from convincing the org to "democratize" more out to them.

Pendulums swing. Now we are seeing trends towards "platform engineering" which ... IMO is just a trendy name for what has happened in the past ... there should be a team of trained professionals providing the "platform" upon which application development can happen (and move quickly).

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anon-stocks@reddit

They said this 15 years ago with cloud.

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Excellent-Hippo9835@reddit

It’s changing cloud admin

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just_some_onlooker@reddit

Your colleague hates you and wants to gate keep. Or you are you colleague a d you hate your colleague. Don't gate keep.

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XandrousMoriarty@reddit

DevOps is nothing new in concept. I have been both a developer and a system admin for years, and not once in the time I have been working have I ever NOT had to code or diagnose a problem.

The term DevOps is relatively new (and that's a stretch these days) but the concepts and the work are not.

So, your friend seems woefully out of touch with what it means to work in a modern IT position, while at the same time is exactly on point.

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SleazzyJefff@reddit

He couldn’t be more wrong.

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aXeSwY@reddit

that app just self-sustainable, how the heck someone work in IT or interact with it have such view (insight).

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aXeSwY@reddit

until AI can physically manifest system admin isn't dying, it's true more companies will be outsourcing it but people doing it are still sysadmin

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Adderall_Rant@reddit

I think he's saying there's no openings for you at his job

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largos7289@reddit

It's changing i wouldn't' say dying.

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alexisdelg@reddit

I think pure sys admin jobs will phase out or change to be more inline with devops processes. that will probably look like implementing IaC for deployment of new servers/switches/routers. Things like ansible, terraform and other tools to automate as much as possible.

You get bonus points if you can also take an active role in writing the pipelines to deploy the code or proving tools for the sde to do that in a more automated way.

What is dying is clickops, servers as pets, manual work in general

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dALT0_0@reddit

Nah. Only in specific environments can sysadmin be replaced by devops.

The problem with that mentality is that almost no organization can have a cookie cutter template of an IT department. Every organizations needs will be different based on their objectives and their environment.

My day to day as a sysadmin is managing and monitoring backups, reviewing firmware/software update cycles and statuses,and troubleshooting break/fix issues within the servers we manage.

It’s enough work to fill out my day.

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uptimefordays@reddit

Systems administration isn’t going anywhere, developers simply aren’t interested in the maintenance and management of systems—which is good for people like us! However your colleague is absolutely right that our roles are changing, for those whose daily tasks were “allocating more resources to VMs” or “making user accounts every Wednesday morning AND ONLY Wednesday morning” you’re probably getting replaced with a script if you haven’t already. But there’s endless opportunities for people who understand operating systems and networking on project oriented teams. I save developers tons of time by telling them “hey you know you can just do this natively right? We don’t need to implement this or that, the OS can do it way better.”

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solslost@reddit

Best to stay in helpdesk replacing computer.

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SecurityHamster@reddit

Our sys admins are completely bogged down with work, admining servers and branching off into admining apps. There doesn’t sound like there’s hardly any day to day adjusting of memory or storage. Hands off on builds or hardware installations - servers are purchased, thrown in racks and imaged, that’s where the sysadmins step in.

So no, no roles that are strictly limited to admining windows and Linux servers at least at my job. But admining those servers AND their workloads? Plenty of work for them. And when those workloads slowly move to the cloud, they’ll be moving along with them and learning the new tools

That’s just my own experience, other orgs could be in completely different places.

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Gushazan@reddit

I'm doing some sysadmin stuff for my home network and since then have developed a newfound respect for sysadmins. They are the rubber that meets the road.

Integration is the name of the game and sysadmins are the ones tasked with the job.

There are so many little pieces to manage, I can't imagine how those guys get any rest.

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sadmep@reddit

Think it through to the logical conclusion: if everyone becomes devops who is managing the servers and infrastructure. DevOps? If so, they've become system administrators with additional duties.

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ruolivert@reddit

The convo around AI is that IT roles will turn into HR roles for AI agents. Stay curious and realize value isn’t going to be in specific skills but in the ability to learn new skills.

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Loop_Within_A_Loop@reddit

I think he’s kinda right.

There are a decent amount of people here who are not strong coders, and I think they’ll struggle in the near future

If you’re under 55 and have no intentions in getting deep into automation, pursue a different path

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jacksbox@reddit

People have been saying this for 15 or 20 years. For sure the number of sysadmins needed in companies has dropped in that time (for many reasons - automation is one of them, more MSP usage is another, the proliferation of SaaS services for everything is yet another).

But you'll notice that even in the most conservative scenarios you still need someone to represent the technological interests of the company. And, if technology is a core part of the business, someone to help get things fixed when it all goes sideways.

Sysadmin role still exists but I would anticipate a very blurry line with that and Jr DevOps roles. A sysadmin who can automate things.
Pure sysadmin and pure management roles seem to be slowly going away in my region for the SMB market. Many companies are hiring "IT Directors" who need to be hands on. In some cases they get 1 headcount for a help desk person and that's it. If I had aspirations for pure management I'd aim for a large company where management still provides a lot of value. If I had aspirations for being a sysadmin I'd keep my soft skills and leadership skills sharp.
I've already seen the sysadmin and helpdesk roles merge heavily since I started in the industry. Just look at this sub, it's called "sysadmin" but at least half of the topics are helpdesk related. That's not a bad thing - it's great news for helpdesk people trying to break into the sysadmin market. It means sysadmins who want to stand out should try to add a specialty (DevOps or automation is one, cybersec is another)

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naednek@reddit

As soon as there is a issue with a server, who will dev ops cry to if it's down?

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klauskervin@reddit

As long as there are human working on a computer somewhere there will always be help desk / system admin work. The vast majority of workers do not understand the technology they utilized and rely on to complete their tasks.

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Jacmac_@reddit

Most system administration is going the way of automation. The application administration isn't there yet, but OS/VM/Storage/Network type of administration and management is definately heading for DevOps/Cloud. Long term I think everything in the IT space is going to be a shrinking field as AI gets better. The same can be said for DevOps and Developement in general. The human as the interface to get things done isn't going to be needed in 10 or 20 years. Once AGI is out and there are actual working humanoid robots, even the physical required aspects of IT start to look questionable.

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Capital-Midnight-120@reddit

Well there will always be IT systems, and there will always have to be someone who actually understands them. How those systems look is constantly changing.

Sysadmin is a broader role than supporting specific applications.

And imo anything that ends with -Ops is also kinda just an extension/variation of a sysadmin. You'll likely be fine.

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SpiritualHiker@reddit

I have acted like whatever I'm doing is dying since getting out of school with PowerShell skills and seeing the click-ops guys panicking. This way you're more inclined to stay on the cutting edge.

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jamesaepp@reddit

That's like saying doctors are going out of style because hospital management is more important.

Hospital managers should be doctors.

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mrjohnson2@reddit

For the last twenty years, people have been saying that X will replace the sysadmin.

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Straight-Sector1326@reddit

Honestly, from sys admin point of view I think we are all screwed. Basically we are few billion dollars away from Ai taking a hell lot more jobs than we can imagine and we all gonna be replaced. Someone says nah what are you talking about. Imagine ai agent with chatgpt brain and memory. Easy to train ai that uses PC as you. It can chat, talk. How many jobs is in problem?

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pizzacake15@reddit

The question there is, who's going to maintain the AI's infrastructure? The AI itself? I don't think so.

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Benificial-Cucumber@reddit

I don't think the sysadmin role is dying, but it's definitely in decline. Between virtualisation, containers, and orchestrators like kubernetes, one sysadmin can cover the same ground as whole teams once would, and that's before you even factor in PaaS hyperscalers.

It'll never be dead dead, but a good chunk of it will be split out into more specialist admin roles, and what remains will be hugely more efficient requiring far fewer individual admins.

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Lucky_Foam@reddit

You will always need more than a single person.

What happens if they get sick? Or go on vacation? Or needs to step away for a few hours for a doctors appointment? Or gets burnt out being the only person working and they just don't come in anymore?

There will need to be people to back fill and cover.

Just like systems. You need redundancy in your workers too.

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Benificial-Cucumber@reddit

Of course, but the redundancy scales with the resource so the core point still applies.

Obviously it's not a 1:1 match; a team of 5 wouldn't need 100% redundancy in the same way that a lone admin would, but if that lone admin can cover the same scope of 5 then your redundant team goes from 6+ to 2.

Numbers straight from my ass of course but you get the idea.

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Straight-Sector1326@reddit

If ai with maybe billion dollar investment is building webpage, what stops it from building idk failover cluster onstwad of sys admin. We will have show

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pizzacake15@reddit

A downed cluster would still need to be fixed tho.

Realistically speaking, say you have proposed to use robotics to address that situation. Why would the top management invest millions or billions of dollars in robotics when a few humans could do it cheaper?

I'm not against AI, mind you. I'm just saying you can't just throw money at a problem and expect everything to be solved. Every option has its pros and cons.

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Reverent_Revenants@reddit

How did pencil-pushers feel 30+ years ago when PC's rolled out?

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noodlyman@reddit

Can hallucinations ever be removed entirely? How far do you trust ai to, say, configure a firewall, when it's been trained on internet data contaminated by bad actors who want your firewall to be misconfigured? A person's got to check it somewhere at least for the foreseeable future.

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leob0505@reddit

I'm so excited to see this happening (AI Agent with ChatGPT Brain and memory using the PC as the user), so I can hijack them (totally easy today), while everyone is hyping up for AI without considering Security and Legal considerations... So I can bug-hunt and receive some cash when things start catching on fire.

Also, something that makes me feel safe in my job, obligatory reading:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/

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Neonbunt@reddit

Sysadmin is one of the few jobs that AI will never be able to replace, I believe.

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rc3105@reddit

Your colleague is an idiot.

Sounds like the type of person thats out of work for years between jobs because “They just can’t find anything” while competent sysadmins know 2 dozen places happy to hire them on the spot.

SOMEBODY is gonna have to be responsible for those systems, be they servers/pcs/mainframes or etch-a-sketchs coated in fairy dust.

So you either wind up with a boss that has the responsibility without any idea what they’re doing (bad idea) or you hire somebody that knows how to update the fairy dust and make them the sysadmin, even if their org chart job title is spider wrangler or percussive maint engineer.

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gihutgishuiruv@reddit

My colleague says the moon landing was faked

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BituminousBitumin@reddit

We've been hearing this for 20 years.

The role is constantly changing. The fundamentals stay the same. There will always be a need for someone to manage the systems that we use. Developers aren't qualified any more than we are qualified to do their jobs. Devops isn't even a clearly defined role, but more of a methodology. It requires administrators, and developers, and infosec, and most of the traditional roles.

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noosik@reddit

when times are good businesses fill their ranks with devops guys that cant do anything outside of their specialist skills.

When times are bad they lay them all off and keep the sysadmin, because he's the monkey wrench for all of it.

Like others are saying, AI will kill devops before it kills sysadmins. I'm finding that sysadmins/generalists are coming back into fashion again, as normally we dont complain if asked to look at something outside of our day to day remit. Try asking a shiny devops guy to do that and there is a good chance they might cry.

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Life_Life_4741@reddit

i have built my entire career on someone asking me to look at something outside of my day to day/scope and just saying. sure, give me a couple of days/weeks

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knightofargh@reddit

Plus it isn’t like the DevOps guy can set his own pipeline up if you aren’t in a public cloud. You actually have to know systems to build pipelines. JSON jockeys don’t know that.

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tbochristopher@reddit

It's not going away but it's evolving again. I've been doing I.T. for 30 years now. I've worked small business all the way up to large enterprise with hundreds of thousands of users. I now use Claude Sonnet all day every day in my job. Systems Administration is not dying. It's the same as ever. What has it always been? If you don't automate things you will never scale.

If you like pushing buttons then you will work for small businesses and deal with small business problems. The money is low. But you'll get to setup PC's and run network cables and walk around and feel like a computer guy. Some people love that kind of work. I did that for 10 years.

In order to get in to "real" I.T. it's all about automation. Before Windows existed, I was writing c-shell scripts to do things much faster than I can push buttons. IToday I write powershell, bash, terraform, ansible, and python, in order to do my job at larger scale. I used to run those script from scheduled tasks/cron, jenkins, puppet, gitlab. Now I run the scripts from N8N inside of docker, on-prem.

What I've seen is that nothing has really changed. I still have to know stuff in order to get AI to produce what I need. I still have to have an orchestration system to run my automation. But I am now a 100 times faster at it. I now use Claude Sonnet 3.5 to write most of my scripts and create AI automations. But AI did a terrible job of helping me get to the point where it all worked. I still had to read manuals and understand linux and setup good security and do proper systems engineering to get to the point where I could use AI on-prem (no saas it's all on-prem). It was hard to get things setup to make it easy.

DevOps is not the future it has been around FOREVER. You HAVE to run that way and always have. But AI is helping make mudane basic things a lot faster. AI currently is also increadibly broken and incapable. It takes me a lot of time, hours and hours, to build the right prompts so that agents don't constantly secrew things up. I often have to build MORE lines of code in a prompt to keep AI from going crazy, than just writing a Python script. Python can't decide to go completely against everything in the prompt, but AI can. Ai is exceptionally bad currently at maintaining context for even 5 minutes. So logs look something like "check disk space, it's ok; check disk space; it's ok; check the disk galaxy, galaxy sparkles, sparkle cupcakes, apartheid." So now I'm building AI models that are not so generalized so that they simply cannot deviate so dramatically to events. Which honestly takes about as much work as manually building out event triggers for a monitoring system.

Things really are not different. It still takes a lot of work to keep things running. I personally have to produce a lot of code in the form of scripts or AI prompts. DevOps is just automation and I've been doing that mainframe computers. Technology changes constantly but it has always ended up in the same space. It still takes I.T. guerillas like us to keep it working.

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I_COULD_say@reddit

Sys admins aren’t going anywhere, but I do think their responsibilities are shifting.

I’m a sys admin / analyst. I support basically all of our infrastructure except networking stuff. That being said: a large amount of my time is focused on automation. Autonomy deployments, building out event driven automation work flows, etc. My goal is to reduce the amount of times my team and I have to actually touch things.

I think it’s fair to say that version of the sys admin role is going away.

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silentseba@reddit

System Administrator is the IT guy to HR. That is the thing that matter today and that is the thing that will matter in the future. Which roles are included in that title is evolving... Just like it has evolved since day one. Anyone that says otherwise has never worked as a sysadmin.

Now... Some people refuse to evolve.. they are the one who will be absolute. A title is just a title... The need for the IT guy in a company is still there.

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Mizerka@reddit

Devops lmao, have you seen aws? You need a 2week course to even navigate their devop'd front end, that they abandoned once delivered and said just learn vscode and json syntax and do code as infra instead.

We have 2 in house aws guys, useless bunch, they are experts in spinning up preconfigured appliances from marketplace but we end up doing everything else for them, they spun up a forti fw since they couldn't manage aws one, open admin to internet for 2 months before they left it to us to get it working.

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mrbiggbrain@reddit

Traditional system administration is becoming obsolete, with a shift toward DevOp

I have found the vast majority of people using the term "DevOps" have zero clue what any of it means. It's just a buzz word. "We are going for a fully DevOps model to add synergy and brand loyalty!"

The DevOps movement has provided some pretty awesome tooling and great ways of doing things. But it's no different then the way automation, virtualization, containers, endpoint or mobile device management, group policy and domains, or the multitude of other things changed the way Sysadmins managed or continue to provide value.

A good Sysadmin is rigid like a pipe. They ensure good processes are maintained and hold their shape. But just like a pipe the right tool should be able to shape them and move them on another path.

Things like Terraform, Ansible, and other tools can make managing infrastructure more consistent and easier to maintain. Concepts like GitOps, CICD, Pets & Cattle, Elasticity, and more can be great and help us achieve value.

IT has always been changing, and always will be changing. But the one constant has always been passionate people who keep it all running.

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SevaraB@reddit

I think what has some people spooked is commoditization of compute. Some people have a very hardware-centric view of systems administration.

First, mainframes were big and expensive, needed care and feeding by specialized talent.
Then, servers were big and expensive, needed care and feeding by specialized talent.
Servers got smaller and started more closely resembling personal computers, so the lines blurred and the field opened up to more people with PC support background.
Hypervisors ended up taking some specialized skills, so PC support and systems administration started drifting apart again.
Containerization works with even smaller and cheaper compute hardware, so we're right back to where we're basically using disposable computers as servers and just scaling out to make room for a replacement when a node bites the dust.
Container orchestration does take some specialized skills, frequently held by the devops teams, so "traditional sysadmin" to some is more and more resembling data center tech work, watching the blinkenlights and just replacing dead units.

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DarthtacoX@reddit

Been dying for 10 years now. It'll keep dying for another 40.

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eri-@reddit

Why do so many programmers/app owners/ whatever else seem to think that every company out there needs a goddamn devops pipeline and matching team.

It's like these people don't understand that most businesses have no use whatsoever for devops.. far more businesses do need IT support/old school sysadmins in some way though.

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Cleathehuman@reddit

“System administrator” as in the job title yeah. It’s more cloud focused or endpoint focused now. AI is unpredictable. I don’t think we should be making career moves based on that yet except maybe if your a software dev. They as a whole aren’t going anywhere but im expecting a 15% decrease in jobs if not more from AI alone

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Extension_Cicada_288@reddit

In a way yes.

Thing is, we’ll still need policies, baselines, governance, backups, controls, reports etc etc.

What we’ve done on servers and VMs for ages will also need to be done on cloud infra.

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Top-Examination-6800@reddit

😂 Who do you go to when ‘Dev Ops’ breaks something?

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whatyoucallmetoday@reddit

The system admin role has been on its deathbed since the ‘90s. There is alway more work to do if you keep your skills up to date.

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TerrificVixen5693@reddit

There is a degree of truth, but we will always need troubleshooting.

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r0ndr4s@reddit

When you search for a definition of devops, what is devops, how to..,etc its all bullshit marketing stuff.

That tells you everything you need to know. No, sysadmin isnt dying.

There was 1 day that we didnt have our syadmins at work, 1, everything started to fail and someone from another location had to rush in.

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Lucky_Foam@reddit

I see this all the time at my work.

Someone goes on vacation or gets sick or just steps away for lunch. Then something happens to something that person was working on and no one around has a clue what to do. No documentation. No email. No Teams message.

Just XYZ is down. ABC is so slow. Etc

I'm being pinged my by bosses boss asking me to look into it.

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imscavok@reddit

IT as a whole is becoming much more efficient, but dying is a strong word. Every business needs an IT system, and every system needs an administrator.

Like at the most fundamental level, how does a DevOps application support engineer answer basic questions for an organizations cybersecurity insurance application? How can you do business today without a cybersecurity insurance policy?

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Berries-A-Million@reddit

lol ,sorry but your friend is wrong. Sys Admin is not going anywhere. Still need people to build servers, upgrade Windows or O/S on those servers, troubleshoot Exchange, DFS, DC's. and so on. And of course projects from replacing all that hardware.

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Jeff-J777@reddit

It is not even going anywhere. Titles now and days don't mean a whole lot it all depends on the job roles and the company size. You could be an IT manager at a small company IE, fancy title but you do everything in IT. In larger companies you could be a sys admin where you just maintain servers.

I work for a medium size company I started as the IT Network Administrator, IE I did everything IT, networking, firewalls, servers, M365, PC, printers, warehouse barcode scanners, security, security cameras, oh and helpdesk. We brought in another person to lighten my workload. It was a sys admin position, mainly helpdesk with some light sys admin roles.

I got a title change to systems engineer, new title same job reasonability.

Is the "sys admin" role going away. No, if something physically breaks someone needs to fix it. If something needs to be upgraded someone has to do it.

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chodan9@reddit

As someone who recently retired I won’t miss having to learn new skills every year to keep up with the changing IT landscape.

But if you’re still in it learning and evolving is required.

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Cobra-Dane8675@reddit

DevOps IS automating a lot of stuff. No doubt about it. But automation isn’t a bad thing. Learn to do some scripting. It’s good stuff. And we will always need someone to run the scripts. Servers don’t run flawlessly and automation can’t do everything. And not all operations lean heavily on DevOps.

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javiers@reddit

(laughing with my 48 years) yes, I was told that the cloud will kill sysadmins. Then earlier I heard that virtualization will kill physical deployments. Then earlier that cobol would not be used in the 2000s.

Look, there WILL be less sysadmins in the future but not that much and some will transition to devops and sysops. Technology in the corporate environment changed much, much slower than you would think.

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Capital-Business4174@reddit

Very true, and I still see COBOL postings in my job market at banks lol

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Kahless_2K@reddit

Your friend is clueless.

Who does he think maintains all the stuff he is talking about?

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SidePets@reddit

Ten years ago IT was going to be outsourced, total failure. Next everything is moving to the cloud, not if you have a decent data center footprint. The people who make these statements have never rolled up their sleeves and gotten down and dirty. Rest easy my friend, follow your heart although you may wish you had not in the end.

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bobs143@reddit

System Administrator is not important until there is a fire to put out. Amazing how many people have this mindset. Not realizing that our day to day work keeps everything running smoothly.

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Vistaer@reddit

Sounds like he’s describing Jr SysAdmins who maintain operations. But fact is a Jr Sysadmin is not only maintaining stuff but understanding where dependencies exists and exposure to Day to Day tasks should lead to discovering areas to recommend future projects - automations, integrations, enhancements, streamlining services. This raises the skill level to a more senior admin over time, and times when workloads are low gives time to develop proof of concepts, evaluate vendors, update documentation, and actually work up presentations - either to leadership to pitch project ideas - or to colleagues to appraise them of recent, ongoing, or roadmapped changes.

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coukou76@reddit

As long as there is IT in companies there will be jobs. If you work in IT. AI is helping like google helped in the late 00s. It will be a productivity multiplicator and that's it.

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Grimsdotir@reddit

You always gonna need that one person who knows how to verbally abuse printer to make it work, and generally make everything work including your coffee machine/fridge/car/random stuff.

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cmack@reddit

Your colleague is an idiot.

Sysadmins have always been about sysops (devops). Sysadmins have always been secops. Sysadmins have done everything you think you are special at here. mic-drop.

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FerretBusinessQueen@reddit

I don’t think systems administrators are going anywhere. I definitely use AI now but I identify problems and use AI to help me massage out problems. And trust me, there are a lot of them. As well as stuff I need to do manually, or having client meetings- that’s not going anywhere. I see AI as making my job easier, not as a threat, at least not to me.

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timbotheny26@reddit

Haven't people been saying this type of thing for the past 15-20 years, if not longer?

It's because of people like your college that 18 year old me was scared away from the field; I spent almost all of my 20s doing blue-collar work that I absolutely hated instead of going into IT like I originally planned, and I've regretted it immensely. Only now, at almost 30, am I finally trying to get into the industry.

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Ok_Information3286@reddit

Your colleague isn’t completely wrong, but the view is a bit oversimplified. Traditional sysadmin roles are evolving—not dying—due to cloud, automation, and DevOps. However, strong sysadmin skills are still essential in many orgs, especially for hybrid environments, infrastructure reliability, and security. If you're interested, transitioning into a sysadmin role can still be a solid move, especially as a foundation for future DevOps or cloud roles.

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slayermcb@reddit

15 years ago I was told by a college professor, one who had retired from working at Intel, that I shouldn't bother with IT because it was all getting replaced by shifts to data centers and virtualization. The whole 6 would be remote terminals, and there would be no need for in person techs or admins, as they would all be part of these foreign data centers...

Hope he's not still holding his breath.

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LBishop28@reddit

No, the traditional sysadmin will not die because there are several small and medium sized companies that have 0 use for DevOps. DevOps isn’t going to do the work that sysadmins typically do either like troubleshooting actual problems, M365 work and deploying off the shelf software smaller companies buy rather than develop.

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Res18ent@reddit

Sysadmin is not dying anytime soon, but it evolving, so you need to upskill to not left behind. DevOps is only relevant If you work for a software company. Any company with E-Mail, identity, security Services. Who is gonna manage that? A DevOps Engineer lol?

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ohiocodernumerouno@reddit

did you know that for $15,000 a month Amazon web services will answer your calls in 15 minutes and give you a concierge service with best practices? If you do that much volume, you're literally a rockstar all the time because Amazon will just give you the answers. Meanwhile, these tiny. MSP's are struggling just to make sense of Brother printers for people.

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ohiocodernumerouno@reddit

i'm a admin and I die inside every day. lol

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telmo_gaspar@reddit

Sure... and mainframes will end, virtualization will end physical servers and serverless is the future... 🤣

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benderunit9000@reddit

In my org, devops is not an IT role. that would be an engineering role. Different department.

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noideabutitwillbeok@reddit

It's not dying, it's just changing. I still deal with folks who don't get that we can virualize nearly everything and the days of standing at a rack of 8 physical, single role servers with a single KVM, monitor, mouse, and keyboard are long gone. I have a few folks I deal with who are clinging onto the old school way of doing things while the world passes them by. And they are scared for their jobs.

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pegz@reddit

If anything, sys admins will just inherit more responsibilities like they have for the past 40 some years.

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Sasataf12@reddit

Sure, devops could probably do what we do...but who's going to do their tasks while they do ours? And vice versa?

It's not like the work disappears...

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antihippy@reddit

Lol. Unlikely. You will steal need someone who actually understands networking.

At the end of the day what we're called doesn't really mater. We didn't used to be called sysadmins we used to just be called admins... the names change but the job is still there.

"Traditional system administration is becoming obsolete, with a shift toward DevOps."

This line made me laugh more than is probably healthy.

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CMDR_Shazbot@reddit

It's all the same shit. My title has changed over the last few decades and yet the problems are all the same

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Ambitious-Yak1326@reddit

The role has evolved that simply being a traditional sysadmin is not enough. You need to understand more of the stack above, like kubernetes and how users deploy their applications these days. That starts to blur the line between sysadmin and devops. Users expect on prem systems to work similarly to public cloud, so you need to understand that and talk in their language.

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DocDerry@reddit

I had colleagues saying this in 2013/2014. It didn't make sense then and it doesn't make sense now. Writing scripts and writing code have some cross over but that's about it.

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julioqc@reddit

Sysadmin is a broad role nowadays. I worked a support role at a call center and some colleagues had sysadmin as their title because they did support for a customer's windows environment. Often sysadmin is just T2/T3.

Sure some tasks are bound to disappear but the human managing an IT infra is bound to stay for a while. Just maybe less of us, more qualified admins, more specialized.

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Zerguu@reddit

Traditional system administration is becoming obsolete, with a shift toward DevOps.

DevOps is not a job - it is a framework. Like ITIL or Agile those are frameworks and within of it there still tasks that have to be performed by a skilled system administrator.

The workload for system administrators is not consistently demanding—most of the heavy lifting occurs during major projects such as system builds, installations, or server integrations.

Tell this to our system administrators. Every day we get tasks, changes, maintenance, alerts.

Day-to-day tasks are generally limited to routine requests like increasing storage or memory.

Server commissioning and de commissioning, updating servers, depending on organization also rack management, Azure/Office 365 management

Based on this perspective, he advised me to continue in my current path within application administration/support.

Application administration is what will get replaced by automation. With automated GitHub and CI/CD who need application administrators?

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lord_of_networks@reddit

I think he's right that sysadmin as seen traditionally will die out. But it basically just means you will get a new title and slightly different responsibilities. The way I see it, there will be a split with some focusing more on vendor mgmt of SaaS services and integration between services, with another group going more towards platform engineering working closer to developers to build platforms for SaaS (or in cases internal) services

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Clowl_Crowley@reddit

sys admins say sys admins is disapearing

dev ops say dev ops doesn't exist anymore

As a field tech who want to move up it looks bleak everywhere since i didn't go to uni

I wonder how much it costs to buy 5 goats and a plot of land

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GladObject2962@reddit

Sys admin isn't going anywhere. Realistically the ai agents are going to have issues only people can resolve. There's going to be network /firewall issues, an ai bot isn't going to be able to consider all the risks for potential projects or implement safeguards to counter them and an ai agent is going to need humans to connect it to secrets in the cloud environments etc

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Sample-Efficient@reddit

I wish all those deciders lots of fun in the cloud, when the cloud-systems/apps have severe problems. No access to the phys servers, access to underlying databases, no competent staff to call. AND no way back, so the providers can raise prices ad lib.

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wrootlt@reddit

It depends on how you invision what sysadmin is. There is no strict set of responsibilities. One might be managing one system whole time, another might be supporting 10 different, the other focusing on Linux only, one just on patching and some do tickets whole day. All of these cases are still here. Development heavy companies maybe moving more towards devops roles.

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loowig@reddit

I had to cross check what is what. Turns out I'm a DevOP just as much as Admin.

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i_am_stewy@reddit

You colleague is right.

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Wallilalelhaan@reddit

Quit jacking of all the Trades and put the lotion in the basket

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dorraiofour@reddit

Your colleague is dramatic, yes the role evolve and change but AI will not replace everything nor kill the role.

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Fatality@reddit

Why would you not want to do DevOps? Even as a sysadmin I spent most of my career trying to automate everything.

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petr_bena@reddit

yes I would say sysadmin role is shrinking since cloud came to existence. Even on-prem systems are more and more being managed in a cloud fashion, where everything can be software defined and is highly abstracted, but it depends who you work for.

If it's a large corporation, focus to DevOps might be pushed hard. If it's a small or mid-size business it's very unlikely, unless they outsource everything to cloud, the on-prem infra is usually too small to benefit from DevOps approach.

That's from my experience - I work for large corporation and have some side gigs for small companies, in my primary job we moved everything to DevOps and it started being pushed almost decade ago. In smaller business I work for, everything is still old-school. Some on-prem servers, some data in cloud services (O365, e-mails), but the office HW still requires some sysadmin to take care of it.

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WalkThePlankPirate@reddit

I mean ... DevOps is coming on 20 years old now, the shift has already happened.

Sysadmin work is still a thing, it's just changed a bit - you'll likely be expected to write some code, put your config in git and deal with infrastructure in the cloud (there's plenty of companies that do things the old way though)

Some call it DevOps, some call it infra, some still call or Sysadmin.

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RiceeeChrispies@reddit

The industry never stands still, you just have to keep on the treadmill and continue to develop/strengthen your skillset.

I feel like job titles change, but ultimately the mission remains the same. They’ve rebadged it.

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p3ac3ful-h1pp13@reddit

Sys admins have been dead for a while. Systems engineering nd architecture is the current sysadmin but even that's getting outdated by devils. Good luck

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TimTimmaeh@reddit

Agree to disagree. I lead multiple infrastructure teams, for me it is essential these days that everyone is strong on automation. The days are over, where you do everything manually and don’t think in „Infrastructure as Code“.

You can call it now DevOps or anything else. Fact is, that almost all infrastructure supports coding/automation and stuff can be automated. „Physical“ work will be offloaded to vendors / smarthands and system administrators must focus on operations - automation is key here.

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akola@reddit

The sysadmin role is gradually fading slowly, but unmistakably. There was a time when data centers were filled with physical servers and required a team of 10 to manage an average setup. Now, thanks to virtualization and consolidation, a few racks can be handled by just 3 to 5 people. With AI on the horizon, it might only take a couple of people to manage it all. No matter how much you upskill, unless you're in the top 1%, the outlook isn't great. It won’t happen overnight, but I’d say within 5 to 10 years, this shift will be hard to ignore. Gl

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Impressive_Quote9696@reddit

Im a System Administrator and I agree. Lot of free time between big projects