[zdw]

Hey, instead of paying a person to keep our data on our own systems, we can pay a bunch of companies to keep it on their systems.

They'll never fail, get obsolete, lose our data, get bought out by someone who ruins them, have availability problems, or lock us into using just their service, right? Guys?

[patio11]

Paying a sysadmin is, sadly, not a guarantee that one will have-future proof redundant systems with seven nines of availability that are meticulously documented enough to seemlessly hand over to anybody with a sufficiently wizened countenance.

OK, dueling strawmen out of the way, let me try to add some value to this discussion. Just like the lower rungs of the value chain are getting eaten up in programming, the lower runs of the value chain in sysadminning are also getting eaten away. Back when I was in middle school I was, I kid you not, routinely told that the comparables to my labor at HTML editing all charged $100+ an hour for making websites in Notepad. (Complete with under construction signs.)

Thankfully, the state of the art has improved such that there are a variety of options for e.g. a church school to have a web page listing upcoming Christmas pageants without having to pay $10k a month on an ongoing basis for maintenance.

You know the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs? Well, don't look now, but in a lot of areas they are winning. My old day job called me a Systems Engineer, which includes basic sysadminning, and over my very short career standard deployment practices for e.g. Rails apps have improved radically in a direction which requires me to spend far, far less work at this aspect of m job. There are "real companies" on similar stacks who have server-to-admin ratios which just 10 years would have been unthinkable. (100 to 1? No problem. It's really just 3-to-1 with heavy automation in play, anyhow.)

Sysadmen in the audience worried about their career prospects should probably try pushing themselves up the value chain. There was once lots of value in babysitting cranky programs which blew up frequently in unpredictable ways. That looks like it is changing. Look at Exchange versus I-can't-believe-its-not-Gmail from the perspective of a firm with less than a thousand employees: heads you have someone whose full time job is to fight outages, tails you do not. Don't be the John Henry in that scenario: remember, he dies at the end of the story.

[itgoon]

> the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs

When I preach this, I modify it to "always eliminate your role". Your job won't go anywhere, but what you're doing for that job should always be changing.

[TomOfTTB]

Well it's not always that simple. Sadly technology isn't 1-to-1 and a lot of Enterprise solutions have become stagnant.

To give one example. We've recently started moving our users to Box.Net because the hassle of having a VPN connection for each user just to have them connect to a server with ShadowCopy was becoming too much. Box.Net requires no such VPN connection and its syncing is superior to ShadowCopy bandwidth wise.