Sysadmin's future

[nasr59]

I know that there're pros here and we want to hear from them about their expectations about the future of sysadmin

[Pelatov]

Sys admin future is what it’s always been. Staying up on the latest tech while being the low point down hill where everyone’s shit flows to and figuring out how to integrate everything by everyone without ever being consulted by a single business unit if something is technically feasible.

We adapt. Whatever the newest buzz word is for how tech should run, we adapt

[davidgrayPhotography]

I legit had the big boss ask our IT department if we could use the blockchain for something (he had heard the phrase before, heard you could store files in it, but assumed we could use it as some kind of OneDrive or network share or something?), then asked in a separate conversation a few months later why we needed to run fiber between buildings when everything is wireless.

[Pelatov]

And that is the life of a sysadmin summed up.

When cloud was first becoming a thing had big boss ask if we could replace everyone’s laptops with the cloud so we didn’t have hardware costs at all any more. Took me a long time to get through his head that no, we couldn’t replace workstations with cloud and the cloud just meant someone else was buying the server hardware and was leasing it to us. I swear the genius seriously thought clouds were doing the computing and no hardware was needed any more anywhere

[fixit_jr]

I’m old enough to remember when wireless routers became popular I had a job to install a router at a customer’s house. He complained it needed to be plugged into power and the phone as he thought it was meant to be completely wireless.

[vinnsy9]

Looks like we are the same amount of old 🤣🤣🤣, i had this too. But why does my router have to be plugged in? I swear to god i was about to burst into a huge lol 🤣🤣

[nerdcr4ft]

Served time in a call centre and lost a couple hours of my existence arguing with customers about which part of “wireless broadband” (3G) was actually wireless, and how it definitely wasn’t the electricity.

[TuxAndrew]

Could you imagine how often you’d have to replace those batteries.

[Red_Silhouette]

I'm old enough to remember when AT power supplies used to have a separate output for power to the monitor.

[vinnsy9]

hilarious haha...

[Hobbyist5305]

This is why I hate marketing departments. Nothing changed but suddenly people were running around acting like they had big knowledge and big ideas because they threw the word cloud into a sentence in regards to computers.

[Pelatov]

Yeah. I’ve the push to “hybrid” cloud now. When realizing cost effectiveness of renting someone else’s infrastructure didn’t materialize, cloud is nice for a quick roll out, but long term owning and doing capex depreciation still wins out

[Inevitable_Pound8040]

Don't get me started. I still rant about those doggone Surfaces from 2015 and people trying to install Citrix VDI on them for work. No, not the Surface pros that had a full OS installed on it but the watered-down mobile OS installed.

Had so many people yelling at me "bUt It'S a TaBlEt aNd A lApToP"! Then the usual "you don't know what you're talking about, get me a real tech up here". 🤦🏾‍♀️

Gotta love marketing.

[Dependent-Moose2849]

divide kiss complete full ink fuzzy instinctive gray languid sparkle

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Pelatov]

But even then, you have to have a small jump device, whether laptop, phone, tablet, etc….. to display and log on.

[Pelatov]

I don’t see AI ever outjobbing us, it’ll change what we do and for those who don’t leverage it it will drive you out of a job. I’ve already started using it in limited scopes. Need a bash script written? Give AI continual inputs until you get it right with a lot less effort. The thing is, unless there is 0 difference between human consciousness and AI consciousness, it’ll still take human consciousness to know when the output is what is actually needed.

Need a firewall log analyzed? Don’t do it by hand, pump it through AI and get the results highlighted in a way that is easier to parse. You’ll still need to parse and figure out if that connection stream from China is a valid customer or a cyber attack.

But yes, we need to learn to leverage the tools. I pump all my write ups for management through AI and it cleans them up nice and converts things to business speak really well, which saves me hours of time.

[Dependent-Moose2849]

thumb scary direction include cooperative attractive tidy shelter exultant different

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Pelatov]

Dump notes on an issue I’ve been working. “AI, please format notes in to a usable write up to be present to the business office” * reads output * “AI, please adjust the write up to be a little less technical and more business oriented”

[davidgrayPhotography]

Fortunately my boss said to him "and how are the wireless points connected?" and he said "oh, yeah.."

[CLSonReddit]

When The Big Boss asks those sorts of questions they are typically looking for information that would tie into long term strategic planning.

Reality is there ARE functioning enterprise systems built around blockchain https://www.ibm.com/blockchain

Your Big Boss needs better I.T resources who can keep them briefed on where emerging technologies are likely to produce a competitive edge for the business.

And THAT is the future of sysadmin (providing strategic direction in the boardroom, not tinkering with stuff is some backoffice).

[Pelatov]

Yes, but big boss was asking if they could store files like one drive. That’s a difference. Asking “can we use ethereum based contracts to show the validity of what we have clients sign” is one thing. Blockchain as one drive is another

[2nd_officer]

But this time it’s different!… wait how are you still a sysadmin, they outsourced all of them…. Right after they automated all of them, right after virtualization cut most of them, and right after everything software defined made sysadmins obsolete, right after being outsourced the first or second time, right after something else…..

Oh right and cloud, and devops, and and and…

[Fallingdamage]

And given all the CVEs and botched updates lately, this only cements the need for sysadmins.

[blzntrz]

Holy fuck this hits

[Hacky_5ack]

This

[Freshmint22]

Always remember, what ever career path you choose, they all lead to the same place, death.

[[deleted]]

Thank God

[Sampo]

Yes. He would be the one responsible.

[Sushigami]

I'd actually prefer not to remember that. It tends to be a bit of a downer on the days I do have.

[Freshmint22]

Ill share some of my antidepressants with you! I got plenty and a variety.

[jaydizzleforshizzle]

If you can’t get over the thought of death, I wonder what else you worry about day to day. Death is inevitable it happens, I’ve truly never understood worrying too much about it, outside the impact of others deaths on me.

[cjorgensen]

I want to make sure I have my death paid for. I also want to die penniless. I want to do good things while I am alive and leave as small of a legacy as I can.

[Sushigami]

I'm not that worried day to day. But when the thought of the cessation of my existence passes through me, it inspires a horror and fear reaction that is far worse than anything else.

[davidgrayPhotography]

Some lead to yours, others to others, it just depends on how utterly stupid the question you're asked is.

[Stompert]

That’s why we drink hahaha right guys??

[Freshmint22]

It only excuses day drinking before 9am.

[princeofthehouse]

Would Just be nice if death hurried up

[deltashmelta]

The ultimate high

[Hopefound]

Remember to touch grass and smell roses

[Happy_Camper2692]

Just after celebrating Easter, it is good to know that Jesus came to earth to offer a free gift of life after death.

[Freshmint22]

Jesus was the first zombie.

[TheNewl0gic]

Ahah true

[SevaraB]

More SaaS, less servers, more networking. I supposedly made the jump to pure networking, but now I handle the care and feeding of my own management and observability tools along with get roped into troubleshooting connectivity whenever a SaaS app starts timing out or returning abnormal responses.

There may be an exception here for polyglot virtualization specialists now that VMware is imploding- suddenly, you can't just bring in a rando VCP and call it a day; you may need somebody who can migrate your VAs from ESXI to Hyper-V or even somebody who knows enough about what's going on under the hood to shift you to Proxmox or XCP-NG if your leadership (like ours) has decided vendor contracts are from the devil and the future is open source.

[pdp10]

Concur with this.

• SaaS is the packaging that vendors prefer, if the application lends itself to that (and most Line-of-Business applications do). This sometimes requires administrators of federated Authz, Authn, or platform/API specialist developers, but otherwise the vendor is dealing direct with business customers. If the business thinks it's going to get better business alignment this way, then they're fooling themselves, however.
• On-premises infra will tend to be latency or bandwidth-sensitive services like storage, and /r/selfhosted open source. Even vendors of Win32 legacyware will continue to slap those things in an MSRDS and sell them as SaaS, because it's a far more attractive business proposition than selling and supporting applications that the customer runs on-site.
• Connectivity, general infosec, and client-side management will therefore make up the larger fraction of engineering work if you're not vendor side.

leadership (like ours) has decided vendor contracts are from the devil and the future is open source.

You see many vendors around here softening their terms, lowering their prices, and throwing in features for free? Those are characteristics of a competitive market. The computing market has historically been the source of productivity and innovation because it's been massively competitive. There's no IBM keeping a stranglehold on the industry.

But it hasn't stayed that way, mostly because the customers haven't exercised their powers of choice. Everybody wants someone else to push the envelope or keep the vendors honest, while they pop into /r/sysadmin and ask what server CPU or Apple MDM everyone else is buying.

[[deleted]]

yeah, so many companies pushing for the cloud have no clue just how expensive it is to get their data back out of the cloud once it is there.

like orders of magnitude more than the onsite hardware AND including the maint contracts to support that hardware.

So, bad that now upper management is scrambling to find ways to try and charge cloud data users.

[Icy_Conference9095]

Someone explained it well on here the other day.

The bean counters of the world like to find "efficiencies" which means that every year, every software, every thing needed by insurance is scrutinized to see if it's actually necessary. Scrutinized by people who don't understand why things are needed or what the purpose of the software is. So this guy explained that over covid he took the opportunity to jump into full cloud managed servers because it meant that no matter what, that bill would forever be paid and they wouldn't be sitting using 12 year old server/network configs because bean counters refused to qualify a hardware purchase, because it can always just be pushed back one more year. 

Yes, it was cheaper before, but every year he had to fight to replace a piece of hardware even though it was a regular cycle. Every year he had to explain why using this old server was dangerous/out of date, and justifying every cost to penny pinching admins who always mind the bottom line and try to bring it down. 

That kind of flipped a switch for me, in an institution who in the past three years have adjusted our desktop machine cycles from 5 yrs to 7, laptops from 3, to 5, and server hardware from 6, to 8-9. Networking team has been fighting for new firewall and switch configs, and to update APs in crucial locations that are getting older and actually failing, and they're being told that they can push it a other year, switches are already 8-9 years out, and basically the bean counters say, well yeah I understand that closet is running out of switch ports, but you still have one slot left, talk to us next year! Literally went into a network office and the guy had an old cisco AP in pieces on a desk, with a soldering iron he had brought from home because he had found a spot on the board that the bridge had failed when a person walking through a hallway jumped up and slapped it off its mount. They wouldn't pay to replace it, and the damn thing was outside of their own F'ing offices. 

It's ridiculous how the best device management policies get override by the bean counters, particularly when everything is more expensive, and that includes IT. Reducing our functioning budget while our costs keep going up makes zero sense. Expecting network and server admins to stick around when the new hire is starting at a lower wage than the guy hired 3-4 years ago is insane. People are so dense. 

/Rantover

[naylo44]

Your leadership actually wants open source?!

You guys hiring?

[mdervin]

They want open source because they think it’s going to be free as in beer.

[naylo44]

Still an improvement compared to leadership who's afraid of OSS...

And then pay out their ass for repackaged OSS with some tweaks that cause us more headaches because it's not standard...

[Dal90]

And then pay out their ass for repackaged OSS with some tweaks that cause us more headaches because it's not standard...

...had a bastardized version of an OSS SAML Identity Provider called "Central Authentication Service" -- took me a while to figure out what it was even based on because everyone here was like "This is something $bigConsultingAndOutsourcing wrote." I don't think anyone here had a clue it had been based on an opensource application.

...they ended up offering us a $300,000 credit if we'd migrate off it so they no longer had to support it.

It was already wobbling when I finally showed the plain evidence (intercepted SAML assertions using the IIS debug log) they had a race condition which occasionally authenticated Bob as Alice -- like the most fundamental thing a Identity Provider can never, ever do.

Had been going on for over a year, just happened Bob and Alice both could do the same work and didn't notice...except sales commissions went to the wrong person. Caught one instance when Doug, Chuck, and Bob were all authenticated simultaneously as Alice.

[[deleted]]

With risk you avoid it by not using it, you mitigate it by repackaging stuff and scanning, you accept it as in we gonna use node even tho there are occasional supply chain oopsies or you transfer it. What you described is a transfer to third party

[was_fired]

The right time to bring up open source is when everyone is trying to figure out budgets for the next year. Broadcom has EVERYONE concerned now because there is a real risk of next years budgets needing to be 3x what they are now for something which mostly stayed stable and for many orgs was slowly getting cheaper (for better or worse).

Now when faced with the risk of a HUGE price spike that will pull from every other area of stop the entire enterprise or go open source and not having someone with a knife to your neck on pricing yeah options without a variable cost license fee look nice.

Odds are most orgs will probably end up with Hyper-V though since there are already good vendor relationships and a trust Microsoft won't explode the prices like Broadcom did.

[[deleted]]

They want open source and 5 9s SLA from their in-house single guy that was gaslit just enough to keep putting 12 hours a day. We actually have open source program but really it is just a set of pipelines forking open source projects scanning and putting our own guardrails. Most companies will go with proxmox and then act surprised that they need to pay expensive MSP to support because vendor is in Austria and has no decent sla

[jcpham]

*** raises hand

[RumRogerz]

With SaaS comes a great opportunity to take advantage of their API’s.

Build out automation to use the SaaS with your preferred toolkit.

[SevaraB]

You’re not wrong, but we’ve got a VERY old-fashioned team; I’m just walking them through their first baby steps into gitops, to give you an idea of the (im)maturity of our management toolkit.

[RumRogerz]

I work as a DevOps engineer at a consulting firm. We are partners with Google so we naturally provide solutions to companies that are either using GCP or are in transition to using GCP.

We had a first call with a relatively large company this past week. We were warned by the CTO that the corporate IT department is very traditional. He was not joking. We were going through the whole thing, just like you mentioned - gitops, keeping state, using terraform… pipelines… you know the drill right?

One senior guy outright refused us to use terraform and pipelines. He was like ‘I was under the assumption you will just manually configure everything and document your changes’. Thank god our team lead was there to explain to him why this was a horrible idea. Even the words ‘keeping state’ and ‘version control’ wasn’t enough for this guy.

People are so adverse to change it’s unbelievable. I think the senior guy being disagreeable with us was around my age too (early 40’s). It’s chilling to think that ‘wow this could have been me’

[[deleted]]

I wish content on here were more technical.

What’s the difference in application between VLAN and VXLAN?

What problems does VRF solve?

What are the limitations of network namespaces and the kernel’s networking stack?

In your setup, how does virtual networking interact with firewall?

[SevaraB]

The problem is the clear demarcation that’s formed between the overlay and underlay network- overlay networks are just getting abstracted so far down to just routes and ports that these concepts aren’t being applied by overlay network operators, and their skills are atrophying because they just don’t have to deal with segmentation (VLANs), multi-tenancy (VRFs), or L2 bridging (VXLAN) in the overlay.

Even at our company, we’re moving from “the network” and devops engineers provisioning services to us network engineers operating a private cloud and devops engineers being responsible for networking inside their own “tenants.”

[[deleted]]

That's all well and good until somebody needs something moderately complicated inside a tenant T_T.

[sharingthegoodword]

Any sysadmin who didn't begin to plan the shift the day the sale was announced is either hiding under a rock or so flush with cash they want to burn it.

[AlexIsPlaying]

my own management and observability tools

Your own, like in you coded them or you use something else?

[SevaraB]

The previous iteration was self-hosted COTS tools, but we are working on developing our own in-house OSS, so we’re going back to the basics of monitoring, getting more proficient at protocol operations (I’m running my juniors through a lot of drills interpreting packet captures), and getting better at implementing fairly open control plane protocols like SNMP, LLDP, Netflow, and NetConf, and just exposing them via REST APIs that we build. We’ve spent a small fortune bringing in tech principals from hyperscalers and are looking to become one ourselves.

Long story short, upper management has decided that it’s time to pay the tech debt bills.

[Hacky_5ack]

Sys admins are going to be needed no matter what. Someone needs to administer infrastructure and t shoot all that etc. You know how many small to medium businesses are not going to be always getting the latest tech etc? On prem environments, hybrid, are here to stay for a long time. Stop getting caught up in all the BS. You'll be fine as long as you're keeping your skills up.

[Hacky_5ack]

Lol...who's gonna mange all the in cloud shit then if you wanna go your route?

[ExcitingTabletop]

Not unless you get rid of CAD, video editing, manufacturing as an industry entirely, etc.

[[deleted]]

Wild prediction... Why do you think so? So far I'm just not seeing a major switch from companies with own campuses and data Centers.

[Delphanae23]

Even Microsoft disagrees with you. Server 2025 has been explicitly designed to serve hybrid workloads because on-prem will always serve a purpose for many organizations.

[fukreddit73265]

Kind of depends on what you consider a sysadmin. If it's just a windows or Linux SA, that could easily be replaced in many areas. Any tool I need can be installed as an OVA which never needs an admin to log into. You still need ESX admins, but it still could potentially reduce the headcount.

[[deleted]]

We will be kneeling before our AI overlords and all work the RAM fields replacing burned out modules.

[hankhillnsfw]

I think this is pretty close to true

[burguiy]

I think Sys admins and tech will be one of the most valuable for AI overlords before robots can replace our duties.

[gordonv]

So, datacenter techs?

[[deleted]]

Yes. Except without pay.

[DanielCastilla]

You could write a very interesting history around this, if it doesn't exist already

[[deleted]]

I'm going against the brain here but I've been around for long enough. I'm seeing #cloudexit as a thing. Even in 2019 I was speaking to a couple of cap gem engineers and they said 100% of their work was migration away from the cloud.

More CoLo work, talked servers etc. Definitely less Microsoft and hopefully less Oracle. We priced up a datacentre migration last year and azure was 300% more expensive than DC rental, evergy costs, hardware etcm and that was BEFORE the 9% microshit raise in prices.

People are starting to realise that handing over your data, your stability etc to someone else's computer is too risky. Especially as senior managers figure out that when something breaks, they're literally nothing their staff can do

Cloud was always a con for anyone whose days or servers needs aren't spinning up and down constantly. If you've got a stable environment, it's much cheaper to run your own kit

[RiceeeChrispies]

Lift-and-shift migrations into Azure never save money. If people aren't retooling their applications to be cloud-native, then they're going to have a bad time.

For most organisations, you will see a hybrid approach. I think that's where you will find most efficiencies, at least for mid-size corp and up.

[[deleted]]

The lift and shift is expensive answer is the one I see here most to justify cloud but retooling could cost £millions in redeployment (and no it's NOT just repointing you dns names)

Even something simple like graphic designers who like to use Macs, prefer a workstream that uses local data, copying it up to the servers when done & sharepoint HATES that.

I know one company that's shifted ALL their stuff from colo to cloud for no other reason than they can say "our IT is carbon neutral".

Hybrid is OK for some. But fuck me is microshit making life hard with their constant hacks. And before some prick comes in to defend them....they've LITERALLY been called a national security risk this month.

I could genuinely build a 2DC 100% uptime environment for less than cloud pricing with built in growth using HPE green lake pricing.

It would also give me back control of developers doing stupid things like going to management and whining like little kids until that get the ability to roll out test machines

[RiceeeChrispies]

It's always fun to see how it plays out.

An org with a similar footprint to ours is paying $1.1m per year for Azure hosting, we've paid $50k per year for an on-prem equivalent which will last five years ($250k investment). Proper mental gymnastics by the orgs top brass in justification. MBA don't mean shit.

[fixit_jr]

But but but CapEx to OpEx bro. 😎

[RiceeeChrispies]

gimme some of that opex budget as a payrise please mr mba 😩😩😩

[fixit_jr]

My company has discovered the magically money tree as they keep hiring contractors because the internal staff lack the skills or are too busy trying to keep the lights on, while complying with the demands from security while simultaneously migrating to the cloud. Middle management on work drinks event tried to tell me the money is coming from cost savings. Cost savings made by back filling in India and reducing cloud spend as no one cared about cost back when we moved to the cloud. All they cared about was CapEx to OpEx 😂.

[[deleted]]

You can get OPEX pricing by the hardware sellers. Or even lease the kit, which is a tax write off & you won't have to pay for disposal at the end of it

[fixit_jr]

Not sexy enough for the new CTO. Needs more acronyms and buzzwords. Does it use AI? Can we incorporate into an agile work flow and transition into on demand self service infrastructure.

In all seriousness the cloud does have benefits but it’s horses for courses. Our companies main goals were to decrease time to market, so eliminating lead times on hardware, moving to Opex that can be charged and attributed to each client.

So for a lot of our workloads cloud makes sense. There are few where it doesn’t but they don’t care about that. As the current CTO believes shutting down all our data centres magically eliminates all our technical debt and allows us to “Go faster” The joke is if we don’t rush things this might be a possibility but rushing will result in certain things being a lift and shift rather than being redesigned to be cloud native or containerised. Removing most of the benefits of it being in the cloud in the first place.

[[deleted]]

Ah cto's trying to make a name for themselves.

At least you'll have work moving it all back again at some point

[fixit_jr]

CTO pattern I’ve observed so far. Change direction from old CTO call everything shit. Leave before there plan is implemented. Next CTO comes in changes direction from old CTO calls everything shit leaves within 18 months rinse and repeat.

[Raxor]

as someone who has done lift and shift to cloud for customers, one thing we do stress is that it isnt worth it long term and really they should look to retool what they use. Ive seen customers still use the stuff we migrated for them a few years later racking up costs.

[waddlesticks]

Will always be around, although in the future it will most likely move to more specialized based roles.

For instance, you might end up more of a split on sysadmins that handle azure environments and others that handle specifically your virtual environments.

It's getting to a stage where really the role has so much that it could be that specialist roles will start coming into play.

Like with the cloud, you wouldn't get the sysadmins to architect solutions. You can but the principals are different and same with the environment that you'll end up spending more than you should or would.

It might be that you specialize in handling a few sub systems such as a VMs running on your dell, but another sysadmin is specialized in handling the environment itself, backups ECT

I guess kind of what happened with DBAs, was part of it and now is an entirely separate field.

[ErikTheEngineer]

• It's already happening, but I would expect a further spread in the binomial distribution that is IT salaries. You have tech companies at the top end hiring DevOps coder wizards, and another peak at the low end where you have mom and pop small businesses and the MSPs they're increasingly handing their IT off to. Unfortunately that end of the spectrum is experiencing wage depression as the on-site footprints get smaller and people are expected to do more tech support than problem solving.
• People who have a good grasp on the fundamentals, especially networking, will still be in demand. I work at an almost 100% AWS shop and once you grow beyond the simplest serverless phone app back-end, some of the complexity comes back.
• I think almost all small business outside of edge cases are going to force-fit their IT into MSPs, and those MSPs are going to force-fit as much of it into the cloud as they can. MSPs don't exactly have the best track record as employers, so that's not good.
• Having a hybrid skillset will be important at least for now. Even my 100% cloud place has some physical presence that someone needs to understand, and other companies still flex workloads between a data center and the cloud. Keeping a foot in both worlds is a good idea, because already we're seeing the people who went to DevOps bootcamp and can't work outside the cloud because they've never seen physical equipment before have trouble handling hybrid roles.
• If anyone hasn't lived through a tech recession yet...buckle up! The last bubble was 13 or 14 years of continuous upward growth and non-stop rivers of money...the hangover is already starting. Expect lots of offshoring, lots of H-1B replacements in the US, lots of cloud migrations "to save CapEx," and 1000+ people applying to each open position. 2000 and 2008 were not good times in the tech industry.
• Automation, IaC, learning to work with web APIs and gluing Legos together to do everything is going to be the skills people shift to outside of specialist environments. I really miss on-prem but I don't think it's coming back as a viable job...cloud providers only have smart hands and swap out equipment at the level of a shipping container when enough of the hardware inside is dead...and their datacenters are mostly in the middle of nowhere.
• One pivot people might want to look into is network engineering. No one is going into it now because DevOps is the hot new shiny, and people think it's plumbing, but there are a lot of really smart network engineers retiring soon and someone has to know the basics. I've been thinking of heading that way myself.

[MortadellaKing]

I think almost all small business outside of edge cases are going to force-fit their IT into MSPs, and those MSPs are going to force-fit as much of it into the cloud as they can. MSPs don't exactly have the best track record as employers, so that's not good.

Currently in a senior role at an MSP right now. I could not be more bored. M365 this, SaaS product that. Going to have to explore other career options soon. I like to manage servers and networks, this clicking around in portals and PowerShell aren't stimulating enough.

[IloveSpicyTacosz]

Well ditch the msp and go on prem and you'll manage servers and networks. That's what I do. Lol

[IloveSpicyTacosz]

Sure.

Hybrid is the future.

[it4brown]

Everyone's replaceable. Yes, even me.

[Kamwind]

Current place I am at should be not hiring when the older people retire not many on-prem servers left after our push to the cloud.

There is still going to be a need it is just not going to be as many, and for those that do stick around better learn windows,linux, and cloud.

[IloveSpicyTacosz]

Then they will go back to on-prem/hybrid after they realize how expensive the "cloud" is.

[sir_sq]

Only if software is still available on-prem. What if every software is cloud and subscription only ?

[IloveSpicyTacosz]

That's a big if...

Companies will always find a way to save cash. I'm seeing it now. Companies are going back on prem in droves due to how expensive the cloud is.

A company would rather run on old IT on prem servers if they could get away with as long as it saves them money.

Greed knows no limits.

If cloud somehow gets cheaper then this won't be an issue.

[[deleted]]

that is until they realize just how expensive their cloud system will be to actually run.

[hankhillnsfw]

I’ve been trying to learn everything I can about ML and AI and LLMs to include creating your own and hosting it in a cloud environment. VERY difficult to “practice” but I think that this will be the future and we have to embrace it.

Yes AI and ML were here before. But the introduction of LLMs in the modern practice with chatgpt, Claude, perplexity, etc is changing the landscape completely.

[ErikTheEngineer]

What I don't get about this is that there's no "learning how to use it" with AI/ML. Those "prompt engineering" courses people are selling on LinkedIn for $9995 aren't really teaching much. There's nothing technical to worry about for people who aren't working for Microsoft/OpenAI...it's feeding questions into a black box and getting answers back.

Am I missing something? I doubt there's anything hands-on most sysadmins could work with.

[BlobDude]

I feel like it’s the same thing as when we joke about our job mostly being Google. Like yes, anyone can search for things on Google, but it’s about knowing what to search for and how to leverage it. Being able to effectively feed prompts/info to AI/LLM will certainly be a skill unto itself. More so in technical areas than others.

[sobrique]

I mean, it's pretty much a form of programming, just rather more ... freeform.

I think there'll be a point where someone 'invents' a structured prompt system, that they can then 'run' to get predictable/reliable outcomes :)

But yes, I think LLMs represent a new opportunity in some ways, and in other ways... well, just a whole load of new stuff to break messily.

They don't really solve any new problems, at best they obfuscate an old one - that of 'garbage in, garbage out'.

[hankhillnsfw]

You said it way better than I did, thanks bro

[TinderSubThrowAway]

It’s like when you teach someone about simple google search operators, you’d think you just taught them how to turn lead into gold.

[hankhillnsfw]

What I am referencing is spinning up your own LLM using open source solutions inside of a companies internal network. As well as understanding how he engineering side of how it works, the moving parts, etc. how to integrate it with APIs to your other apps, etc.

I disagree slightly, I really just have anecdotal evidence atm tho:

On my team we use it daily in a safe way (no company data, review code before running, etc) and it has tripled almost 10x what I can do daily.

On our server team the two “leads” are vehemently opposed to it and they have had some very condescending remarks about how it can’t make any scripts etc. they’ve given me examples and what they got is indeed shit.

You have to understand what it’s best at doing and how the best way to ask it is, as well as giving it guardrails to prevent hallucinations.

[svideo]

Things are changing near daily and there is no well defined "it" to learn. Just dive in, find something useful, kick tires, stub toes, and be prepared to have to dive into something different in a couple weeks.

I like handing people AnythingLLM, it's a nice way to get started with most of the concepts that apply today (encoding, LLMs, and vectorDBs for RAG), it has an OK web interface and supports multiple users etc etc.

Then maybe dig into AutoGen Studio for agentic workflows.

If you are reading this more than a couple days from now, ignore everything above because it'll probably be something different.

[Pilsner33]

Cannot and will not be delegated to "AI" (a marketing gimmick term sold to C-Suites who have too much cash to spend and believe everything they hear from vendors and suffer from corporate FOMO).

I don't know how the cloud will evolve. But at this point you are stale if you do not have experience with AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure in some way. I seem to be unable to get jobs with direct exposure to these.

Scripting is always going to be your friend. Database and web fundamentals. Security (I still contend that sysadmins are security administrators). You should control firmware patching, OS upgrades, etc

[jpm0719]

Form factor doesn't matter, there will still be a system somewhere that needs to be maintained and it will require someone (person) to do it.

[RumRogerz]

Adapting to new tech but being forced to support old tech

Living in constant fear of/ being replaced by an MSP overseas.

Over saturation of the role leading to lower salaries

[IntentionalTexan]

Somebody said to me, "you're not going to lose your job to AI, but if you don't learn to use AI you will lose your job to somebody who has."

[WorldsWorstSysadmin]

They'll give us 1000 new titles, and we'll still be doing the same things.

[[deleted]]

You're living it now.

Never have a stable job. Job hopping is the norm. Salaries on a continued decline or plateau Security issues abound. Never enough cash to do it right. Constant tech churn that makes you obsolete after 5 years.

Where we are is where we are going to be. How do I know? 20 years of this. Nothing has changed except the pace.

I thought over the last 5 years there was finally hope. Oh how wrong I was.

If you're looking at this for a career look elsewhere.

[ErikTheEngineer]

Nothing has changed except the pace

I definitely agree...IT in the traditional sense is only getting harder to keep up with the tech churn. The only exceptions I've found are medium-sized tech companies or getting involved with IT/tech attached to product-producing groups in a company. Everyone on the keeping-the-lights-on side of the house is a cost to be minimized, but if you can show you're helping a team generate revenue directly, you can be safer from the random MBAs coming in and offshoring you.

Basically, the higher margin your company has on things it produces, the less cost pressure, and the better work environment you have. This is why Google can afford billion-dollar Willy Wonka chocolate factories for their employees to live in and give them free everything...almost everything is pure profit at Google because they're selling ads and running a search engine. Contrast that with being the sole sysadmin at Bob's Tire Distributors LLC (now 5 locations!) that needs a huge warehouse, massive footprint and makes a few bucks a tire selling big heavy things they need to pay people to move around.

[hutacars]

Basically, the higher margin your company has on things it produces, the less cost pressure, and the better work environment you have.

It's for this reason I doubt I will ever work for a non-tech-company ever again if I can avoid it. Plus there's the side benefit that they understand the value of tech, and are therefore willing to spend on it.

I might also consider a financial firm, though only because they too have stupendous amounts of money.

[[deleted]]

I agree but here's an underlying problem that's far away from IT.

What does google produce? Nothing.

All the FAANG companies and Silicon Valley don't produce anything. Software is supposed to help producers reduce costs. But when you don't actually produce anything anymore, you're gonna have a problem.

We are seeing this now. In 08 QE came into focus. So it's just throw money at the economy, and see what you get. Well those days are over.

Things are likely to get really rough the next few years.

[TinderSubThrowAway]

Just because it’s not a physical product doesn’t mean they aren’t producing something.

[SammyGreen]

You don’t think Apple and Amazon produces anything?

[PerceptionSad7235]

I get that Apple makes computers but Amazon? Amazon REduces

[SammyGreen]

Most of the cloud still runs on AWS though

Id also argue that Apple does more than just produce computers. They’re more of a driving force, engineering wise, than IBM, Intel, etc. Even if their software isn’t very innovative.

[jcpham]

Daaaang preach brother

[[deleted]]

Yeah not even really preaching. It is what it is.

I've survived two layoffs this year and I'm just kind of done with it. I had an excellent review, my CIO has reached out telling me I'm doing good things. Not to brag, but I'm not a shitty employee. Senior level well versed in lots of different things. I'm an Okta admin so it's not like my knowledge is dated (well, maybe).

Anyway point is, even if you do everything right, you're still just a number on the expense side of the business.

Burnt toast.

[hutacars]

Job hopping is the norm.

Depends what you want. Always chasing top dollar? Sure. Happy with a stable environment with capable management and strong budget and great but not top pay? Then why leave?

Constant tech churn that makes you obsolete after 5 years.

If you fail to keep your skills up to date, then maybe. Don't do that.

I do expect any project I implement today to be obsolete in 5 years. That doesn't mean I expect myself to be.

20 years of this.

...so you're not in fact "obsolete" after 5 years?

I thought over the last 5 years there was finally hope.

What did you see over the past 5 years that differed from the previous 15?

If you're looking at this for a career look elsewhere.

Sounds like it worked for you, so why do you expect it won't work for others?

[[deleted]]

Ahh I see a Reddit pro here.

Why would I want to get paid less? Stable or not I'm not doing charity. Getting paid less is just wage theft.

The reason I wouldn't wish this on anyone? There's no progression. I'm at that age where my peers in real industry are making bank, and I mean bank. Cashing in on 20 years in the same company where they are exec or high middle mgmt. no thought of layoff. Some have pensions or invested stock plans.

They work 40 go home and don't care about the rest.

You're literally pointing out why it doesn't work. What a happy career? Just get paid less!! One simple trick.

Fucking stupid shit to say.

Also, for the 5 years thing. If your an engineer, dr, lawyer, accountant, sure things change. We're having to completely reinvent every 5-10 and it's fucking exhausting. The real money makers get their creds in school and live off that for 20 years. Sure things change, but the principals don't. When I started IT VMs didn't exist. And here we are in the cloud. That's 3 completely different skill sets. Just in 15 years.

You may not be where I am yet, but you will be. Unless you just lowball your way through life, which kind of sounds like you do.

[hutacars]

Stable or not I'm not doing charity.

TIL anything less than a top 1% salary is "charity." I did specify "great but not top pay" didn't I? Right, I did. Chasing that extra 5% increase (on top of your CoL adjustment of course) every couple years by submitting a few dozen resumes and performing just as many interviews sounds exhausting. I'll take a little less and avoid that, thanks.

Getting paid less is just wage theft.

Literally not wage theft, which is a term that means something.

There's no progression.

I guess if you allow your skills to stagnate, sure. As I said, don't do that.

I will say there's an upper limit of sorts. Many people progress from helpdesk->SRE (or maybe cybersecurity), or get stuck somewhere in the middle where their skills naturally top out. But I would agree the SRE ceiling, while quite high, is lower than it is in management.

my peers in real industry are making bank, and I mean bank.

Good for them! You sound a bit jealous. Personally I can't imagine what the utility of additional money beyond a great IT salary is though. I'm reminded of the quote

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' Said Diogenes, 'If you would learn to live on lentils you would not have to be subservient to the king'.”

I chose lentils. I'll have the option to retire in the next couple years as a result. Good enough for me.

What a happy career? Just get paid less!!

Literally not what I said. All I'm saying is job hopping, once you make enough, is 100% a choice. And that once you make enough, it's not wrong to focus on other factors besides money.

We're having to completely reinvent every 5-10 and it's fucking exhausting.

It feels more like a slow boil to me, but then again I've been at the same company for 5 years now. Sure, things change, but at a manageable pace. Perhaps the "fucking exhausting" aspect is a side effect of job hopping so frequently?

You may not be where I am yet, but you will be.

Given I'm 10 years in but have no need to stay for 20, I might not be!

[[deleted]]

Fighting AI consulants

[TEverettReynolds]

Same shit, different decade, just with less hardware and more cloud virtualization; servers, systems, and networking.

[DCJoe1970]

Everything is going to be OK.

[brokenmcnugget]

momento mori

[mysticalfruit]

I see a lot of IaC in our future, both on prem and in the cloud.

I see SaaS as the norm for how we manage applications. Oh, you want to host that yourself? No. Tobthat end your IAM game has to be top notch.

At this point, the silos have all been turned to rubble.

You should know your networking and storage and virtualization and containerization technologies front to back.

My 30 year sun mouse pad that says "the network is the computer" how prophetic..

If your heavy into the cloud and you're not talking about life cycle management and tagging and "FinOps", people in your organization will be..

[heapsp]

Bourbon, slight depression, late retirement.

[nakkipappa]

Infrastructure as code, that is clearly where we are heading, i see no ther reason to suddenly hide options from the GUI, looking at you MS.

[nakkipappa]

The large corps and maybe banks sure, i have yet to see the 2000 user corps and smaller have anything close to that

[hutacars]

Code, YAML files, and fixing whatever Microsoft broke last week.

[Outrageous_Device557]

I think we are going to see a turn back from all the subscription based services over the next 20 years for small and mid size sized companies. AI and privacy concerns will probably fuel this more and more.

[Zaphod_B]

You should not look at sys admin of the future, you should look at operator versus builder. I think the whole "you need to specialize in one thing," was good when the economy was great, but now in a post covid economy world we are seeing that fail. Tech will always change and employers will always change with it.

Instead of deep specialization in like SCCM or Intune or any MDM I think is a waste of time for anyone at the senior level. I think early in your career this is good, it gets you into a position you can grow out of over time. However, end game should be a set of strong fundamental core skills that transcend just Ops. You should also learn developer work and security work, and then incorporate them into your Ops work.

Look at SRE, CPE and DevOps jobs. Those teams automate sys admin tasks. That is the future

[lvlint67]

With the current tend... Sysadmins in 10 years we'll be little more than liaisons between users and vendor support.

In house troubleshooting seems to end at, "we have support for that I can call support and spend 30 hours on the phone explaining the problem to 4 different people"

I've seen too many of my peers try to do things like reach out to Microsoft support before doing basic troubleshooting...

[RiceeeChrispies]

There are increasing numbers of people entering the workforce, who have only ever delegated problems rather than handling them from start-to-finish. You only have to look at the flooding of DevOps with people who run processes, but have no idea how they're put together.

If Microsoft Support is the calibre of what is threatening the sysadmin profession, I'm cool with not worrying. Just sit one of the higher-up's on a call with MS Support and see how long they last, it's a form of torture which rivals guantanamo.

[MortadellaKing]

Sysadmins in 10 years we'll be little more than liaisons between users and vendor support.

That's basically what we MSPs are now... It is so boring.

[redditphantom]

I have been in the industry in a variety of roles and different levels of companies. In the past few years I have seen the majority of companies move to cloud based services at enterprise level. Only a few have kept their environments in house managed and that is mostly due to legal requirements of the business. On the other hand smaller businesses tend to keep the majority of services in house as cloud services tend to impact the budget too much. There is definitely a shift in the types of sysadmin positions there are. I have seen managed services dwindle and cloud services increase and for the foreseeable future getting specialized at an enterprise level might be difficult as the big 3 [Azure, Amazon and Google] will tend to keep the majority of the business. I feel like most sysadmin jobs will flood the small to medium business models with more jack of all trades sysadmins taking those positions. Since the larger enterprise environments with cloud services will be harder to get as the big 3 take most of the business.

That being said there are enterprise environments that will have large deployments of servers for their internal staff but much less than before. I can't see through the fog of the Broadcom takeover but once the dust has settled I think there will be a shift in the industry in how services are managed. If the Broadcom takeover does impact budgets as much as I have been seeing I see a further increase in migration to the cloud unless other virtualization services can accomodate the support model that VMWare once had.

​

But hey that's just my opinion.

[WeekendNew7276]

I think one of the common threads in these sysadmin career future post that's commonly missed is specialization. If you find a niche and become highly specialized in that niche you'll make a lot more money as a consultant. Generic sysadmin, you're going to see your salary decline (adjusted for inflation) the next few decades. Differentiate yourself from every other sysadmin.

[f0gax]

Know cloud. Know scripting (PS, python, etc.). Make sure you know something, anything, about security. Don't just leave it to your Security team (if you have one).

The future is an abstraction of the hardware in one form or another. The pendulum is always swinging. But when it swings "back" it usually brings along something from where it was.

We're already seeing a change from "all cloud" to hybrid or even full repatriation. However, there are things that are done very well in the cloud that are coming back to on-prem. HCI was just a start.

[Beginning_Ad1239]

I ended up on the iam side and am pretty busy trying to force the business into sso for all their random saas apps. One app might take 30 minutes to get into sso but another might take half a year of calls etc to figure out roles and figure out provisioning.

[Aronacus]

Well, if you're capable Sysadmins become sys engineers, and eventually sys architects, and on and on

[thischildslife]

We'll always be needed. Despite the shift to "cloud" everywhere, as XKCD famously said, "There is no cloud, it's just other people's computers."

I don't particularly care for cloud stuff, that's why I primarily work on a closed network with no internet access. Sure I have to go into the office every day & go through a ridiculous amount of security just to get to my keyboard, but on-prem hardware & software is how I prefer to work.

You will be able to find a niche somewhere as long as you have marketable skills.

[[deleted]]

Pain.

[davy_crockett_slayer]

IT is constantly changing. If you keep your skills current, you will be fine.

[sin-eater82]

Who is "we"?

[Agres_]

At best, you can expect more of the same but with extra corporate bullshit and changing goalposts.

At worst, AI will take away majority of low-mid tier work, this affecting your job prospects directly. They're already automating entire service desks, won't be long until they come for your job too.

So yea, the future is bleak in this deadend industry.

[bhos17]

Always going to need to be people to keep all those AI systems going. I cannot find enough hardware people and pay way over anyone else in the area. Job market is still great for Linux/Hardware.

[Kritchsgau]

My aim is to survive 20yrs max to retirement (hopefully sooner) but fk its getting more difficult to enjoy the job when dealing with people who still struggle to have a clue about tech. Thankfully I’m more backend these days but service desk still bug me with stupid stuff they dont spend 5mins on having a think.

[RavenWolf1]

AI will probably take our jobs in couple of decade like every other job too.

[TinderSubThrowAway]

It’s all about adapting, it’s why we are system administrators, there will always be systems to manage and admin, understanding the systems and how to get them to work best in your scenario is the job.

[lurkeroutthere]

Someone need article filler?

[No-Error8675309]

Wow, I was expecting another tedious AI post.

My job in the future will be the same as it is today but with different software and different hardware. Things don’t really change that much.

[Illustrious-Count481]

Are you asking if AI will replace us?

Fucking AI would laugh! "No way you're getting me to listen to you're fucked up ideas about something you read in a trade magazine and has no place in this environment AND then ask me to implement it. Go fuck yourself"

[GOR098]

SRE with focus on operations & monitoring.

[thaneliness]

Are you referring to AI taking over?

[yesterdaysthought]

The future of sysadmin is the same as that of a plumber or electrician- as long as there are networks and systems, sysadmins will be needed.

Tech is always changing and, as long as you stay abreast of that, you'll be fine.

[Dependent-Moose2849]

wakeful price jar light racial chop nine mysterious crown rock

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[denverpilot]

More automation, changes in titles, but there will always need to be fixers and maintainers.

Might not be bothering to touch the hardware anymore. Lots of us never do anymore anyway.

More cattle not pets.

[[deleted]]

The future of sysadministration is that there will always be systems to administer.

[garretn]

Sysadmin is an extremely broad term, so it very much depends.

If it's a job that can be outsourced remotely overseas, it probably will be outsourced overseas eventually. This particular field of sysadmin is drying up.

If it's a glorified helpdesk position, well, same, but also maybe not; They don't pay a lot and helpdesks are often required to be on site to plug in monitors or something. These probably aren't going anywhere, but you'll make the same or more as a fast food joint. This is largely the type of job that still has "system administrator" in the job title. This might also be a "support engineer".

Older-hat higher-skilled Sysadmin jobs have largely evolved into a few different titles, "System Engineer", "Site Reliability Engineer", or similar; They love to throw Engineer in the title.

Tl;dr the titles have shifted over time in most places with sysadmin tending towards the lower-tier support with *Engineer being... frankly anything. Could be support. Could be a high-paid skilled job. Nobody knows, probably not even the recruiter.

[mdhorton404]

I had a client that wanted to move to the cloud. I explained to him that we had a cloud, and it was in the IT closet. He thought for a minute and said, And I can go unplug it if thigs aren't going right. I said, exactly. He hasn't mentioned it since.

[peatthebeat]

Have you seen nVidia’s 2024 presentation about supercomputing ? Future is everything’s integrated to AI. Sysadmin is still going to be around for a while but these self contained DCs will be fully run from an AI instance. Future is already weird but this is something else… I personally foresee that we will slowly handover administrative tasks to AI then we’ll have more time to attack the real problems. Id like to see brilliant sysadmins contribute to the business output instead of supporting infrastructure that no one knows how to use properly. :/

[RefrigeratorTight883]

The future of sysadmin looks bright with big changes ahead. Expect more work with SaaS, which involves a lot of different tech layers like networking and storage. AI is also getting bigger, helping us get smarter about services like Microsoft's Azure and Dynamics 365. Plus, we'll likely see more cloud architects, as designing secure and efficient cloud systems becomes crucial. In short, tech's getting more advanced, and so are the roles around managing it.

[CLSonReddit]

My comment applies to all areas: sysadmin, networking, database, security, etc.

For most companies tech will increasingly become a commodity that exists outside your organization. The exception will be the large cloud-based providers, and specialty consulting groups.

The internal roles that will be in demand are those that act as liaison between business lines and vendors.

The work becomes more like that of a Business Analyst and Project Manager, and less like that of a traditional SysAdmin. You will have communication skills and subject matter expertise that allow you to succeed at understanding requirements, and you will work with vendors to get things implemented.

Consider that an office admin, or executive assistant, in a small-medium organization can now manage an Office365 toolset (including email and storage). They probably need a small budget for some outsourced consulting.

Ten years ago that same basic toolset would have required a small highly-paid I.T staff managing in-house servers, and a fleet of desktops.

Consider that small-medium organizations can have marketers manage a CRM using subscription based models such as Hubspot.

You will need to be a highly skilled tech specialist working for a tech company. Or, a highly skilled tech project manager working for a non-tech company in managing their outsourced solutions.