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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Sysadmin seems to be a bit of a dying role - most of the competent people are probably looking for DevOps or SRE roles.

Which... is really just sysadmin with a fancy name tbh.

Eh, I'd argue that sysadmin is maintaining running systems by hand, and DevOps is Infrastructure-as-Code. There is a qualitative difference when you switch from one to the other.

Sysadmin jobs haven't been maintaining systems by hand for the last 20 years (my entire career). A good sysadmin has long used scripts and other tools to help his work, and from there it's easy to move to infrastructure as code.

That's true. Maybe the shift also is from servers-as-pets to servers-as-cattle.

I just think there's a definite shift between the two types of admin, even if it occurs in parts. And because the change is large enough, we use two different words to describe the jobs.