[shykes]

Yes and no. System admins aren't disappearing - they're specializing into 2 distinct professions:

* Those working for infrastructure providers (IBM, Amazon, Rackspace) focus on the bottom half of the stack: everything from the datacenter's floor plan to switching and VM allocation.

* Those working for infrastructure consumers (everybody else) focus on the upper half: the business's software stack, how to glue it together, and where to run it.

Conclusion: system admin, as a profession, is gradually disappearing. But it's being replaced by 2 better professions: more challenging work, higher perceived value within the organization, and higher demand.

[nailer]

Shykes comment is better than the article. since about mid 2000s sys admins, regardless of what their job titles are, have become infrastructure engineers. learn the vmware Api, the red hat satellite api, some databases, write some socket apps for monitoring, learn some charting. I'm actually a developer now, but the demands of infrastructure engineering is how I got there.