[WastingMyTime89]

Amusingly I would never hire a sysadmin to do security. Sysadmins were taught how to administer and apply this knowledge. With security the field is constantly shifting, you don’t want someone who knows how to apply you want someone with a deep understanding of the underlying principles able to design and explain new solutions. It’s really an engineer job.

[dsr_]

Amusingly, this is a recent development.

Once upon a time there were programmers.

Then there were systems programmers and application programmers. Systems programmers wrote operating systems and utilities for them. App programmers wrote apps. There was a lot of crossover.

Then there were operators, systems programmers and application programmers. Operator was a junior position who did physical things (mount tapes, plug in cables) and ran commands to do things on the systems. They usually moved up to being…

Systems administrators, who did some programming in service to the systems, but not too much. The more senior a sysadmin was, the more time they spent programming and the less time they spent doing physical things… unless they wanted to do that.

Sysadmins started to specialize. People who configured switches and routers and talked to telephone companies became “network engineers”. People who spent time working on firewalls and security policies and thinking about that became “security engineers”. Junior people who read scripts to end users became the helpdesk. And so forth.

Then we noticed that a bunch of people were doing things manually when they should be automated. This was especially bad in places where there were no senior sysadmins or systems programmers. But we did have the internet, and senior sysadmins got together and started writing tools to make their lives easier: infrastructure automation.

Remind me, which kind of engineer?

[WastingMyTime89]

That's very cute but that doesn't mirror my experience with reality at all. Sysadmins are people who are hired with specific knowledge regarding maintenance and management of the infrastructure. They are expected to have operational knowledge, are not asked to design novel solutions to unforseen problems and are paid accordingly. Most sysadmins I have worked with become unpleasant when they reach the limits of their expertise not curious. Good sysadmins tend to leave the field for better paid position in engineering or get hired as SRE by large companies which is aking to moving to an engineering position because SRE work like engineer.

The idea that senior sysadmins are behind the push towards automation is amusing. The biggest shift in the field in the past two decades came from Google when they decided to solve the tension between developers and sysadmins by more or less firing their sysadmins and hiring engineers to do the job instead.

[dsr_]

> The idea that senior sysadmins are behind the push towards automation is amusing.

Many true things are amusing, including this one. I think you are operating with a remarkably narrow and historically ill-informed definition of "sysadmin", and your prophecies are self-fulfilling. If you have a tension between developers and sysadmins, it's a cultural problem.