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Comment by iigs | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but I don't think so.

Not many years ago people got paid to, among other things, pick out the appropriate operating system for any given application. Clearly there's not much of a future in that.

These days that same person is responsible for vetting cloud hosting providers, email service providers, and has to be capable of comparing the "old" in-house solutions and bring things inward if there's benefit.

The technology changes, but the role more or less stays the same. The system admin is generally a bridge between business operations and the technology stack, and there's always going to be glue there, particularly for businesses of at least 10 people.

Disclosure: System Admin / Engineer by trade. Weigh my opinions appropriately.

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A couple things here...

1. I think there's a distinction between Sys Admin and a more management position like Director of IT or CIO. In some companies there's only one person who fills both roles but they are two distinct roles and I think this article refers to the actual System Administration role rather than the management role that selects software and vendors.

2. While I don't think the System Administrator role will disappear completely I do think the focus will switch from one that is more hardware driven to one that's more software/programming driven. I think businesses will expect System Administrators to handle integrating their cloud based services into a comprehensive whole in the future rather than just making sure there's a network to carry data. That's important because it will mean a dramatic shift in the required skill set.

My experience is that my job has never really been very hardware driven. My experience with hardware is keeping our standard server spec up to date with the vendor. Installing OS and applications. I also manage keeping track of warranty status and handling hardware failures, and of course backups.

That's a lot of words to describe work that isn't a lot of my time annually. Especially on a team where the load is distributed. Take into account that a few hundred "servers" are virtual machines running on tens of physical servers and there you go.

My skill set already requires me to manage multiple operating systems and applications. My biggest value to the company is problem solving, whether it's engineering a solution to meet new business requirements to diagnosing and fixing a problem that can happen anywhere from the hardware to application layer. Sysadmins don't just sit and look at blinky lights all day waiting for one to go orange.

I think you are correct - there will always be a need for a (or at least one) sysadmin.

But what cloud services allow us to do these days is scale services without the friction of requisitioning new hardware that used to happen in the past.

Of course, your sysadmin needs to be familiar with tools to help them manage large numbers of servers before this really begins to matter.

You are right on - Sys Admins are the glue between business and technology operations. Ok - so gone may be the days when your companies IT department manages colocated servers and/or leased servers - now they will need to evolve and manage a suite of services in the Cloud including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

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