
Ask HN: Is Systems Engineering / Infrastructure Eng. / Sys Administration Dead? - mancerayder
After my most recent job searches, I&#x27;ve been rudely awakened to the fact that systems engineering is barely in existence anymore.  People with Systems knowledge as their first-class skillset have been replaced with software developers with SOME systems knowledge.<p>The cycle in companies seems to be:  devs make infra, early on.  Infra either doesn&#x27;t scale, or it&#x27;s too time consuming &#x2F; painful to maintain and sometimes lacks redundancy, monitoring, and so forth.  Next, companies seek to hire more devs, except devs that have significant systems experience:  AWS, load balancing, configuration management, etc.  They have trouble finding these so salaries for what has become &quot;DevOps&quot; have ballooned.  Now to be a DevOps means to understand math algorithms, lots of software architecture, lots of AWS, and basic Linux skills.<p>I&#x27;ve been a Linux infrastructure engineer &#x2F; SA &#x2F; SRE &#x2F; &quot;DevOps&quot; for the past 15+ years.  I&#x27;ve been writing code (first Perl, now Python) for most of that time.  I&#x27;ve been setting up configuration management (first custom stuff, now Puppet&#x2F;Ansible&#x2F;etc.) for most of that time.  I&#x27;ve always considered that a Systems &#x2F; Linux Administrator who can&#x27;t code or automate well is either junior or not very good.  I have a strong understanding of Linux internals.<p>Yet, I am finding myself forced to rebrand as a <i>DEVELOPER</i>, as in these &quot;DevOps&quot; roles I&#x27;m asked very little about my core skillset:  Linux, and a lot about algorithms, coding and CI systems.<p>Is the future of systems administration actually full-blown software development?<p>Do you have a similar story?
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danenania
I think there's a ton of value in people who are experts in systems and stay
focused in that area, but I do see the importance of sys admins also being
developers and having firsthand understanding of the developer perspective.

On the other side of the coin, it's also very important that developers
(particularly senior developers) have a healthy understanding of the full
pipeline that brings code from their laptop to end-users.

These two realms of software are yin and yang. How to best approach one
depends on your approach to the other, and vice versa.

If developers and sys admins don't have quite a lot of overlap, the goals that
each are optimizing for can diverge pretty quickly. 'DevOps' seems to have
emerged out of people's recognition of this problem.

All that said, you could well be right that companies are overweighting
development knowledge and underweighting the ops side. It's easy to end up
with 'ops debt' that becomes crushing when developers put off dealing with it
for too long.

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bradknowles
Hardware administration has shifted left. Most places work in VMs these days,
and many have little or no hardware of their own at all. More and more
hardware is being owned and operated by fewer and fewer big shops, many of
whom provide services to those who need VMs.

Classic systems administration is also shifting left. Either you go with the
shift, or you find a way to make yourself useful to those who are left. What
is called DevOps today would be a case of the latter, although there are those
of us who have been doing that same kind of stuff for twenty, thirty, or even
more years - we were doing DevOps before DevOps was a name that had been
coined.

As more and more stuff moves into the cloud, many of us will become Platform
Engineers. We don’t do DevOps much any more, except for the big platforms that
really need that. The rest will be providing the tools and guard rails that
the developers need to allow them to do quick self-service with “serverless”
frameworks, built on top of the tools provided by the big cloud providers.

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mancerayder
In my opinion, systems people are the ones who predict how to correctly
architect infrastructure environments in order to minimize downtime, maximize
scalability and minimize operational overhead.

My gut feeling is that companies are doing themselves a disservice by focusing
on core software development skills and minimal engineering on the systems
side.

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vgy7ujm
Sysadmins have become operators unless they learned to code and rebranded
themselves devops. Operator salaries sucks so people are careful not to be
associated with sysadmin/operator stigma, it's just easier to say
developer/devops to stay relevant for higher paid jobs.

