Sysadmins vs Developers

The cluster centers on debates about the roles and value of sysadmins versus developers, including whether devs need sysadmin skills, if sysadmins are obsolete due to cloud/DevOps, and the challenges of ops work.

📉 Falling 0.3x DevOps & Infrastructure
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#4199
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Keywords

FUTURE SysOps WSL IT NOTHING IN THE IMO NEVER AOL sysadmins sysadmin servers developers administrator devops jobs admin scripts cron

Sample Comments

simonjgreen Jul 14, 2020 View on HN

Remember that the author is talking as a sysadmin, not as a dev

stephenr Jun 29, 2015 View on HN

Give developers a sense that they somehow dont need sysadmins/ops staff?

tachion Dec 29, 2017 View on HN

What you described is not a sysadmin, but a bad sysadmin instead. Also, if you look at the situation 'these days' it's not even a bad sysadmins, it's mostly developers who don't even really know how their computers or operating systems work, but they're allowed to build entire infrastructures using cloud/terraform/k8s/toy-of-the-week ;)

randoramax Mar 7, 2021 View on HN

You mean sysadmins, not developers right? :)

heraldgeezer May 23, 2025 View on HN

Devs need to be sysadmins also.

wiseowise Dec 15, 2023 View on HN

Sysadmining your machine doesn’t make you a better developer.

pclark Jan 17, 2009 View on HN

why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ...

neworbit Jan 25, 2011 View on HN

That still feels like "sysadmins are being replaced by developers" to me

eximius Jan 19, 2018 View on HN

This is not DevOps. This is more of Sysadmin territory. And Sysadmins have hard jobs. Most places don't require top-notch sysadmins because 80/20. But getting that last 20 as a sysadmin is incredibly difficult.

ethbr0 Sep 16, 2022 View on HN

Because most devops folks were not sysadmins. #everythingOldIsNew