I'm sure we all had different experiences with old school sysadmins. The ones I'm familiar with (early 90's, ISP industry) could do shell scripting and some perl. C was way out of their skill sets, except for a bit of copy-and-paste.

The people who wrote tools like terraform and ansible were engineers with system administration skills. Those are very rare.

I’m biased. I worked in teams with such people basically my whole career.

The pay increased, the titles and tools changed but the mentality didn’t.

People just started beating their chest about devops and pooping on the legacy of sysadmins which is what most devops/SRE are.

Sounds like they were automating though.

“Cattle not pets” was a sysadmin mantra, but the business wanted pets most of the time.

There was certainly some automation being done by the sysadmins I was familiar with (I did say "relatively little" in my original post, meaning compared to today!) It was definitely more pets than cattle at the places I was familiar with. These were small-ish companies, and the business didn't care as long as the systems worked.

Sounds like a “devops” in that same position would be doing the same then.

> Terraform was written by a sysadmin

I’m with you on most of your post, but this is straight up wrong.

The original author of terraform (Mitchel Hashimoto) was not an Operations Engineer before writing Terraform?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchellh/

Or are you saying that he's not the author? Commits seem to suggest otherwise.

  commit fb9c58f0e20a85a5358142ddb39a2f74d3bbe69b
  Author: Mitchell Hashimoto <[email protected]>
  Date:   Fri May 23 11:03:38 2014 -0700

     config: better error message

  commit 089822a36f0a5e4c583ab401b7496b48bfa31d65
  Author: Mitchell Hashimoto <[email protected]>
  Date:   Fri May 23 10:52:19 2014 -0700

     config: some comments

  commit ec3f72703c82f50787ef86498d856a5798900ad8
  Author: Mitchell Hashimoto <[email protected]>
  Date:   Thu May 22 16:56:28 2014 -0700

     Initial work on config

  commit 649cf336e86da10910f6e50ea3cfaad507a2e336
  Author: Mitchell Hashimoto <[email protected]>
  Date:   Wed May 21 16:28:53 2014 -0700

     Initial commit

Per my understanding (as one of the earliest contributors to Terraform and employees of HashiCorp) that indeed he was a developer with an interest in operations, not a sysadmin. Mostly consulting work for rails.

> (...) an Operations Engineer (...)

An operations engineer and a sysadmin are two entirely different roles.

A system administrator administers systems while an operations engineer dedicated their time writing code to automate processes.

You're conflating an IT Technician and a Sysadmin.

Sysadmins automate their work. Operations Engineer is just another title for sysadmin.

Systems Engineer is also another title for the same thing.

Platform Engineering (depending on where you are) is yet another variation.

If you're responsible for the operating system, monitoring, clustering, hardware etc; then you're firmly in "sysadmin" land.

This whole string of conversation is some of the most horrendous navel gazing I've had in my comments for a while.

Welcome to Hackernews.

Pedantry is requisite.

> Sysadmins automate their work.

So do janitors. What's your point?

> Operations Engineer is just another title for sysadmin.

It really isn't. That makes as much sense as claiming that DevOps is just a sysadmin that's also a developer.

Job titles are mostly meaningless when comparing across organizations (and often within organizations, when they are large enough.)

Many "operations engineers" are actually sysadmins. Many "devops" are really sysadmins also doing development.