← Back to context

Comment by eitally

11 hours ago

They actually are abundantly available and many are looking for work. The volume of "enterprise IT" sysadmin labor dwarfs that of the population of "big tech" employees and cloud architects.

I've worked with many "enterprise IT" sysadmins (in healthcare, specifically). Some are very proficient generalists, but most (in my experience) are fluent in only their specific platforms, no different than the typical AWS engineer.

  • Perhaps we need bootcamps for on prem stacks if we are concerned about a skills gap. This is no different imho from the trades skills shortage many developed countries face. The muscle must be flexed. Otherwise, you will be held captive by a provider "who does it all for you".

    "Today, we are going to calculate the power requirements for this rack, rack the equipment, wire power and network up, and learn how to use PXE and iLO to get from zero to operational."

    • This might be my own ego talking (I see myself as a generalist), but IMHO what we need are people that are comfortable jumping into unfamiliar systems and learning on-the-fly, applying their existing knowledge to new domains (while recognizing the assumptions their existing knowledge is causing them to make). That seems much harder to teach, especially in a boot camp format.

      1 reply →

Yeah, anyone who has >10 years experience with servers/backend dev has almost certainly managed dedicated infra.