[Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators

Sat Jan 17 23:52:33 PST 2015

On 1/16/15 6:19 PM, Marco Nicosia wrote:
> Great topic for discussion - I have been very aware of the "dual
> nature" of LISA for some time. The 2013 LISA conference focus of
> "DevOps" helped to further blur the lines.

And that's without, even, getting into the definition of what "DevOps" 
means -- I finally have a decent definition of the term for me, that so 
far has passed muster with other people (as allergic as I am to fads), 
but it's a significantly overloaded term.

> I don't think the world has moved away from Systems Administration.

System administration in many respects continues to exist almost by 
virtue of the fact that we have systems to, you know, administer. 
However, the system administration role/profession, I think, is under 
some interesting pressure to evolve or (as in our company) die an ugly 
death.

> The way I see it, just as "Data Scientist" is a new profession created
> by the industry, "DevOps" is a new role, which only became a viable
> career during the first Internet boom, somewhere between 1995 and
> 1998? To me, the term "DevOps" is really a lagging indicator that the
> industry is finally recognizing that there is a role for software
> developers who are not product development focused.

Yes, indeed, but I'd argue that the vast majority of sysadmins I've seen 
out there aren't "software developers who aren't feature-focused," but 
rather ... system operators who graduated to being able to maintain and 
build systems.

> I think you folks
> over at Netflix may have helped codify that by saying, "Put software
> engineers in key roles in every business function." (Paraphrased.) I
> believe that DevOps people are rarely focused on adding additional
> product functionality, though much of what they do enables it.

I'm not sure it's useful to discuss Netflix and DevOps in the same 
breath -- the argument has been made before that what we do could maybe 
more accurately be described as "NoOps," but if DevOps is the idea that 
your ops team and your dev team work better together (and, I'd argue, 
also that your ops team is productively, and efficiently, lazy), then 
Netflix does it different by having just the product owner team which is 
responsible for everything from product features to testing to 
deployment to setting up alerts to responding to them at 2am.  That's a 
different model than many other companies (e.g. Google where you have 
SREs to do the first-level response).

> But Systems Administration is alive and well. If anything, it's more
> exciting and challenging than ever before. Doing a quick web search on
> a random site... say ROERT HALF, shows hundreds of currently open
> Systems Administration jobs. I bet if I were to drill down, I'd find
> that most of them are not production roles at companies that offer
> Internet services. They're IT functions at all corporations of any
> given size. Everyone needs e-mail, everyone needs phones, everyone
> needs laptops, etc.

Well ... sure.  But I feel like what you just basically said is that the 
last remaining roles for IT are in corporate IT (which, don't get me 
wrong, is invaluable and I love love love my corporate IT people) or in 
lagging companies.

To be clear, I think there'll be sysadmin jobs for a long time to come; 
but I'm not convinced they'll be at companies that are considered to be 
cutting-edge and exciting.  And that's not necessary, I suppose, if you 
just want to keep some sort of job until you retire, but -- like COBOL 
developers, or FORTRAN developers, or people who manage AIX systems -- 
the part of the world in which you can find a job will continue to 
shrink and slow down.

> At the BayLISA (and LISA) meetings I've been to, I've certainly felt
> an elephant in the room - IT administrators are there trying to solve
> IT problems, DevOPs people are addressing DevOps problems. The
> opportunity for cross pollination is significant, but I don't know
> that many presentations really start with, "This is the role and the
> problem that this technology is designed to address."

It's not clear to me that BayLISA, and its membership, has changed 
significantly in the last 20 years or so since I started (very 
inconsistently) attending meetings; it almost feels like the general 
membership is still excited about exactly the same technologies that 
have been here for about that long, and I've seen some explicit scoffing 
at the idea of DevOps.  There's a sense of "you kids get off my lawn" 
sometimes.

> Is it time for a new SIG? I doubt it. Is it time for more formal
> "tracks" such as what LISA did in 2013? Possibly? Are "traditional IT"
> administrators getting lost in the hype around the emerging profession
> of DevOps? Almost certainly.

It's not just about getting lost in the hype, though.  I think it's 
about a skills and attitude gap that ends up significantly impacting 
both your likelihood of being given certain kinds of jobs AND 
(correlating with this) significantly impacting your earning potential. 
  With SREs getting paid somewhere between $150K and $350K (depending on 
where you work, of course), I don't see sysadmins -- or people with a 
relatively tight focus on traditional sysadmin talents -- getting paid 
anywhere in the same ranges.  Am I wrong?

-roy