We still exist. Our job titles just changed and more responsibility was put on our plates. Now we do the above work, plus manage automation (Jenkins pipelines, Ansible playbooks, etc) among other work. Not that the increased responsibility is an issue, just that the title makes us seem fancier than we are. I think that is part of the problem, everyone needs some ridiculous title now, a “lowly” sysadmin gets looked at sideways.
Re:I no longer build software
by at_a_remove on Monday September 21, 2020 @10:15AM
(#24543729)
Yes. Although I worn that and other hats before and often together, I disliked being a sysadmin. I don't like being on call, it causes me to wake up at two in the morning to check a website. I do not like worrying about when to install a new patch.
So when my job title switched away from programmer to some kind of DevOps thing and I was shoved back into the sys admin role, I was unhappy about it.
That does depend in some areas of technical /systems programming back then you normally developers where expected to know the basics and be able to do all that - the original full stack developer OSI 1-7.
Trouble is they tended to be interesting but poorly paid jobs
Yes, and other people did this job, not programmers. People that loved tinkering with hardware, low-level OS stuff, networking, etc. We even had a name for them: "system administrators" and "network administrators".
Nowadays everyone's expected to tweak CSS and configure kubernetes in parallel.