People are still doing the job but move on to new forums. The "Sysadmin" job title tends to feel old-fashioned so people call themselves DevOps, SRE or Cloud Engineers these days.
The various terms… it’s essentially marketing.
Edit: I note the mailing list archives require a Google login to view, so they can't be archived.
While there will always be a "need" for competent IT System Administrators, the economic circumstances and impacts of AI have made the demand for those people who could become them now; almost non-existent.
There's a common misconception between demand in economics, and need. Many conflate the two improperly. Demand is where both parties in an exchange can come to a mutual agreement of exchange, this includes only the union of those with the resources capable of making the exchange and those with the qualifying requirements being met at the same place talking to each other without interference.
Need includes all the people (both parties) who are incapable of meeting a exchange for any reason including jammed communication channels from third-party interference.
The latter cohort is quite a lot larger than the former, and when money printing makes adaptation to this a problem for next quarter, no real negotiation can take place. Equally so, infinite cost imposed on both parties through a jammed communication medium (beyond the Shannon limit) forces similar failures as the sequential career development pipeline putting in 0 people as entry level sharpening teeth work is taken over by AI precluding a 10 year countdown to catastrophic failure of the profession. Every 5-10 years a good margin of people cycle out of a sector from aging/burnout/and other factors. Nothing in means nothing out.
Money printing can continue far longer than the pool of viable candidate factors can survive, which consistently shrinks when there is no economic benefit.
By the time any company will be forced to pivot, they won't be able to find the competent no matter how hard they try, at any cost. They are silently burning down the pipeline/distribution networks just like Atari did to the video game industry.
As it stands now, there's no real future in the profession anymore because you can't differentiate the competent upfront as an employer, in a job that takes a 3 month getting up to speed to learn the complex environment.
The competent end up leaving the candidate pool when no prospects are found usually within 1-2 years (given the communication jamming by ghost candidates/ghost employers; i.e. brain drain).
RNA interference in cellular networks applied to communication networks that have been systematically reduced/optimized for SPOFs in the job application process is something only a few have noticed.
How many times has your company gotten all the way to the end of a interview/vetting process in the past two years only to realize the candidates are fake and unhireable, and having to start the process all over again (at great cost).
I've personally heard horror stories about this happening, several times now, from different friends who work at the VP level.
Equally, I've experienced first-hand the lack of any opportunity or callbacks in IT over the past few years, with several thousand applications being submitted over the span with single digit callbacks.
I've a decade of experience actually doing this job, including architect/pm roles, and no ones hiring, and everyone says they are. The point where you have no visibility, and no one can react, is the short point of runaway before catastrophic failure.
What's objectively measurable says no one is really being hired, and communications have been compromised with no means to correct. Makes one wish they had managed to get a defensible space like a farm to ride out the socio-economic collapse that's coming for everyone.
I think LLMs have absolutely nothing to do with this. For years, with the inception of the cloud and changes in processes under the DevOps label, the role of system administrator was practically eliminated. There is no longer need to have someone on payroll to work exclusively with infrastructure. In fact, some companies/teams have software development engineers actually follow DevOps principles and own the whole process and workflows. And that's ok.
Perhaps the role still makes sense in companies who do on-prem, but those are few and far between.
There are also business sectors where they never could fully go cloud-only because of regulatory. Bio-pharma for example.
> the role of System Administrator was practically eliminated.
You don't have an SA just exclusively work on infrastructure, you do have them as generalists that know your environment and systems, and can have them quickly troubleshoot, modify, and resolve UB issues and outages when something breaks on Sunday night on Christmas Eve, or have the DR required equipment on-site to ensure generators are up right after Hurricane Sandy passes, and pre-emptively handle issues before they become outright disasters. Anyone thinking you can have helpdesk do this isn't right in the head.
> I think LLMs have absolutely nothing to do with this.
There are a growing number of places that get lock-in contracts where the SA related services they offer are being done by helpdesk staff manning LLM based chatbots without disclosure, blindly.
This obviously works right up until it doesn't, and by the time people notice the fundamental issue, the competent people the company needs won't be around anymore with a vicious race to the bottom. These helpdesk people may be manning 3 or more chatbots simultaneously in a foreign country while pulling in the same as retail fast food in California. No SA can compete with nominally free slave labor, and these people don't care about Information Governance and unauthorized data disclosures.
Any seasoned SA worth their salt will be capable of automation in python and powershell at a fairly advanced level if they're MS centric, and python/bash for Linux.
DevOps Engineer, Architect, SRE all have quite a lot of overlap with a competent SAs, but SAs aren't getting these jobs. There's no path to getting those jobs, and the actual stats and hiring being done seems to indicate there aren't many people getting these positions, and they are almost universally grey beards.
No one going in, no one coming out, what happens when they die/age out/flame out... The related IT systems fail in growingly chaotic trends, and related production grinds to a halt. It becomes just like the ending of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, but without the new beginning.
LLMs aren't a substitute for people, but companies are using them as such, and there is an increasing body of literature showing that LLM use increases cognitive debt. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872)
>This obviously works right up until it doesn't, and by the time people notice the fundamental issue, the competent people the company needs won't be around anymore with a vicious race to the bottom.
Future contracting opportunities for us?
The price tag must still make that worthwhile too, something that hasn't been reflected in reality so far. If you made 70-80k in 2020, you would need to at least be making 90-100k today just keeping pace with purchasing power/inflation.
Instead you have companies low balling people with decades of experience at 50k on top of that 25% loss in purchasing power since 2020, so your only making 37.5k in 2020 dollars. The math simply doesn't pan out, and that's not taking into account the higher tax rates either.
If you've been searching for work, have the experience, and there have been zero opportunities, for a significant period of time, the competent people change careers and move on, cutting their losses on what amounts to a bad investment. The only people remaining in the pool being the barely competent, and cost increasing. This sieves until no one remains because of those factors leaving the sector voluntarily or involuntarily.
You do have to be able to put bread on the table after all.
Also its a technical field, there is a natural level of skill atrophy if you aren't actively using your knowledge and skills everyday because of no demand. You still have them just because you use them even when you aren't working, but its not quite as quick.
The problem is when you hit that critical point, where there are no opportunities despite a competent specialized skillset, and great need but no demand because the problems are a problem for next quarter to the point no effective reaction can occur from management. This leads to collapse.
It happens in labor multiplier fields first (IT) which then touches everything else. Its not business as usual, its the fall after a three generation boom cycle finally hitting bust. The praxis inherent in the profession then become lost knowledge along with other doom spirals.
fao_•7mo ago
There was a whole chapter in The UNIX System Administration Handbook dedicated to professional ethics and ethical responsibility. These days, SREs and devops people will happily maintain the servers of any kind of company, it doesn't matter how much user data is legally or illegally[0] stolen — you just run the servers, why would you give a shit?
[0]: https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-news/new-research-hig...