Who do you think is doing the automation that you think eliminates sysadmins?
When you go digging, you'll find that it's sysadmins doing the automation.
David Lang
On Mon, 11 Aug 2014, Rhys Rhaven wrote:
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 12:26:25 -0500
From: Rhys Rhaven <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Why don't people join Lopsa?
This is the best place to respond to this, with a guy talking about
Medieval guilds. I'm a rather young technical person. I've gone from
helpdesk monkey to sysadmin to developer. You won't like what I have to
say, you may not agree with it, but someone should say it.
*I find no value in LOPSA because the organization is a bunch of
dinosaurs* *who haven't realized the meteorite already hit. *
Beyond the cheap shots I could make about /That Guy/ with a mail client
too old to properly write the In-Reply-To: header who breaks this
threading, and all the people who reply from the bottom because THATS
THE RIGHT WAY, I'm sure there is a ton of technical expertise in LOPSA.
Demand for that expertise isn't going to magically disappear. We still
have people programming in COBOL ffs.
But the point is that hardware and largely operations can and are being
automated, and its making a lot of services traditionally rendered by
SysAdmins commodities. If you're not a developer, if you aren't moving
to work on APIs, distributed systems, algorithmically optimized
networks, you aren't helping. A lot of SysAdmins I know feel they are
highly skilled plumbers, and that they do good "work." They come in,
they bang on some pipes, redirect some flows, teach some people about
copper vs pvc, then go home to their wife and kids, a days work
accomplished.
I have no wish to do a days work, I'd much prefer to spend all of my
time building systems that outpace humans. 100% of the time. Finish the
task, then move on to a new task, integrate them into generational
"factories" for production. And just as Industrial and Process
Engineering became formal schools and paths of education after their
genesis in the Industrial Revolution, so will Systems Engineer become
formalized after the Information Revolution.
LOPSA isn't getting people (and I say this partially as a poll of many
of the professionals around me) because largely they haven't realized
this. LOPSA is an intermediate step to what the likes of Heroku, Amazon
and Google are only the beginning of. The field of SysAdmins is going to
be split to those who can step up to being a full Software Engineer or
step down to being the digital equivalent of a farm hand.
If you're under 30 pay attention to this.
On 7/31/14, 4:30 PM, Stephan Fabel wrote:
On 07/31/2014 06:45 AM, Denise Adams wrote:
What I mean to tell you is that just having a national group that I
can ask questions to, listen in on relevant discussions to my chosen
career, and have a chance at joining Mentor-ships and extra training
is PRICELESS! And I would have never thought about Systems
Administration unless I had asked about what LOPSA was.
In the medieval ages in Europe, trade was learned as apprentice, until
you 'graduated' as a fellow; you then went out and learned what there is
to know, until you became a master in the craft, settled, and were
therefore eligible to take on apprentices on your own.
In this model, if you are a system administrator out 'in the wild', and
you're not part of a professional organization (a 'guild' in the above
metaphor...deja vu?), you are not only missing out, you are actively
hurting yourself; you can only grow so far with information, pretty soon
you need knowledge, wisdom and experience, and that is exactly where
this exchange of stories comes in that LOPSA can (and does!) provide.
Now, in Europe, they basically dealt away with this entire 'guild'
business, and converted their educational path to a more structured
system involving degrees, certifications and, to much chagrin, 'credits'.
But I think there's a lesson here, and it's not that SAs need to follow
the same rules as the trades of the medieval ages. I believe that our
'craft' is much more multifaceted than any other job on the planet. It
requires the combination of so many skills it is impossible (those
involved at the various education workshops, or SESA '13 know!) to
firmly categorize it.
LOPSA could therefore be seen as the heuristic approach to system
administration education.
*Because* it is not structured, *because* there is no firm, straight
line, statement of objectives/goals/etc. beyond the most basic
expression of supporting the profession, LOPSA actually provides, at a
'meta' level, exactly the kind of environment for the
'trade'/'profession' aspect of system administration to be reflected in.
(Of course, to get past a certain point, you almost certainly want to go
to school and be a little bit more concrete about what it is that you'd
like to excel in, but that's another story.)
I like LOPSA the way it is. People like Denise get out of it what they
want, old-timers get to enjoy time with new-comers, 'war stories' are
being told, everyone gets something out of it. Don't expect LOPSA more
to be than in reasonably can provide.
My $0.02...
-Stephan
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