| 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? |
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.