I think if you want to go back into history and look at things, we had sysadmins who were not paid enough, but fell into "give a man a little power" trap and showed a side of themselves that we would rather not see, fed and reinforced by getting blamed for anything bad that happened 'on their watch'. The cumulative generational trauma on both sides of that relationship sets us up for a situation where outsourcing IT to someone who can't sass back or harass us about our deployment plans seems like a good deal. Yeah it costs about the same and it'll interrupt our roadmap but I get to 'stick it' to the IT department. Fuck those guys.
Now it's been a while and people are starting to feel nostalgia for the old days.
It was never, has never, and could never be about "power". I have always been a generalist, with one foot in both roles of dev and admin.
I am very good dev in 3 programming languages (not including scripting languages like powershell and bash.. php, C#, and JS are my strengths), and passable in about 8 or 9 others (go, python, learning rust now, etc). I hold multiple certs and years of experience in sysadmin roles.
There are very few of us out there, people with extensive experience in both. I can tell you, once you have seen both sides of that wall you come way with the clear view that neither understand the other.
DevOps was proposed as a solution to that, and if Devops would have been implemented as a Management sytle not a role it might have accomplished that goal but sadly most orgs just eliminated the valuable perspective of sysadmins, and as you said "outsourcing IT to someone who can't sass back or harass us about our deployment plans" which from my experience many devs need to have their plans pushed back on because often time they are widely inefficient, insecure, ill thought out, and expensive
I have to wonder, if many of the cyber security incidents we have seen over the last 10 years could be avoided if Dev's lost the chip on their shoulder, and listened to the sysadmin more, instead of just rejecting their point of view as a "god complex" like you seem to
You know why all internet traffic goes over port 80 and port 443? Entire generations of admins who learned that their job was to say “no” instead of “how”. By the time the fingers got peeled away from that issue the damage had already cemented. Similarly ORMs also got a healthy nudge from DBAs who decided it was their job to protect the business from ever doing anything new. Today the priesthood of the DB is all but gone. Devs are expected to do those roles because otherwise nothing gets done.
And similarly, the Cloud doesn’t say “no”, it says “how much”.
Are bad things happening now? Bad things always happen. I read Applied Cryptography while I was still in college, and have worked at a lot of startups and in other small projects, so I am biased toward thinking devs should not be making other teams babysit them. Advice and control are very different things.
Now we have conflated network admins and sysadmin. Different things.
the reality is that was largely ISP's not sysadmins that caused that by throttling, shaping and in some cases out right blocking traffic.
Throw in some laziness by devs as well, it is widely inaccurate to lay that out the feet of sysadmins.
> Similarly ORMs also got a healthy nudge from DBAs who decided it was their job to protect the business from ever doing anything new.
Lots of ORM's were written by people that were DBA's because they were tired of devs that did not know how to construct a proper SQL Query, and thought that Select * was the always the correct way to return data.
This idea that devs had to ride in to save the industry from evil DBA attempting to block everything is a complete revision of history
>>my opinion plus decades of listening to devs vent
I am not sure how a circle jerk is proof of anything? devs in many cases may have gotten rid of sysadmins, but now a new beast is emerged that is making life hell for both sysadmins and devs alike. The "Cyber Security Analyst" and if the devs thought sysadmins saying no was a problem, you have not seen anything yet. Unlike the sysadmin cyberSecurity will be backed by compliance, insurance companies, and standards organizations. They will have actual teeth, and actual power something the sysadmin never had
Companies are not paying enough, but we also do not have as many opportunities (for SysAdmins) to learn things.
Paid Internships, Jr Admin Roles, etc are fewer and far between, companies are looking for "experienced" people in a time where alot of the experience is retiring.
Dont get me wrong there are plenty of us Gen X's out there with lots of experience but most of us are also massively over worked with limited opportunities given for us to train the next generation, so pay is only 1 part of this problem, head count is the other
Even if you find a company that has good pay, they almost always under size their IT dept by 25-50%, and rarely promote internal training or continuing education, or offer entry level admin positions with the goal to skill up people.