Instead you're a site scaling engineer, or a cloud automation specialist, whatever sounds like it'll solve the client's problems - which these days are frequently that a bunch of developers set up the production environment on the fly and it just about works but isn't reliable or convenient.
I think the future for sysadmin work is definitely 'DevOps' - and it's not really that much different from old school sysadmin. Yeah a pure Chef/Puppet-managed system is more like writing code than hacking away, but behind it all it's the same kind of work.
It is definitely possible to bill US$2k per week or more as a contract sysadmin, but trolling through Craig's List isn't the way to manage it!
Could you share some of the most important issues (technical or not) ? In advance many thanks.
I am really curious about your experience as we try to achieve the same objectives here with http://comodit.com
I worked at a company that ended up spending probably several man-years worth of effort over a period of three years on puppetizing their environment and still doesn't have a one-click-deploy of their infrastructure and feels the pain of that acutely every few months when a new environment needs to be brought up by hand.
If someone'd been around offering 30, 50 or even 100k no-cure-no-pay work to get their environment into a one-click-deployable state in under a month or so I'm pretty sure I could've sold that internally at several occasions.