I don't have a lot of insight in academic funding and I know the meme that PhDs don't get paid a lot, but is it really better to use presumably very highly trained PhDs to do the grunt work of systems administration rather than actual research? Honest question here, it just seems logical to hire dedicated technicians for the not-research work?
there is no money for dedicated techs nowadays. Also hiring a competent sysadmin to do on-prem HPC-Linux might prove challenging. And while it is grunt work sometimes (but more so is academic research in lab, which to 90% could be rationalized by a labtech...), it's not too stupid if the people programming the system know how the system works. Aside from racking severs, that's essentially what SRE does, no?
> hiring a competent sysadmin to do on-prem HPC-Linux might prove challenging
Anecdata: I have 2 customers who have had open roles of this type for more than a year each. I'm pleased to report that they are edging their salary offers up into "reasonable" territory - but the fact remains that someone with that skillset would ordinarily be able to get paid twice as much at any of the 3 major clouds.
yes, pay is obviously an issue (likely also for the HPC-center - though I would take a job if they agreed that I can hire/apprentice people properly (a lot of the grunts education focusses on clicking through menus and nothing more today...) and then they let me alone doing whatever the current people did. Probably a fast road to burnout though)
Also noone is doing this then eventually (deskilling is real) and as I really don't want to work for any of the evil empires...
