Funny. Sysadmin's work always included writing missing tools, which is often
above junior programmer's level. What you say is basically DevOps being
system administration for beginners.
Yes, sysadmins have always written the glue between disparate systems, implemented monitoring, etc using bash, and now more than ever, python. But now DevOps roles are expected to (in my experience) lean closer to closer to application reliability engineers; not only must you perform admin tasks, and write tools to automate infra tasks, but you must also dive into app code at a moments notice when shit is broken.
Well, OK, but this was expected from sysadmins as well. It was always sysadmin
who is responsible that the application died, no matter the real reason. Where
do you think the idea of putting programmers on call to reduce crashes came
from?
> It was always sysadmin who is responsible that the application died, no matter the real reason.
Out of the last 15 years of tech experience, I've only seen this be the case in the last 3 years, where the sysadmin/Devops engineer was required to have more ownership beyond "your application is broken, I've restarted it and notified the developer".
Source: Linux|Sys|Network Admin/IT Manager who moved into DevOps.