Slashdot Mirror
The Days of SysAdmin Numbered?
gmkeegan writes "The Economist is running a story about Sun's new N1 operating system whose purpose is to make today's system administrators redundant. The idea is to virtualize the computer system so that the automated resource management software can add, remove and manage everything dynamically. The article mentions similar efforts by IBM, HP, and Microsoft."
Who manages the management system?
Vlad
The Raven
Who's going to delete stuff randomly?
Get your own free personal location tracker
For this to work, there needs to be a very big advance in the area of AI. Otherwise, if anything breaks in a way not forseen by the designers, there would need to be a sysadmin to fix it.
This is more a marketing ploy than anything else.
this implies that there is management who can handle running this, or want to. most Managers don't know networking from a hole in the ground. Somebody's gotta set up the desktops and workstations, and keep them running...even if the software can handle it, hardware needs troubleshooting every now and then too
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I'm still fielding questions about power buttons, dirty mice, and saving documents. I'll be around for a long long long time.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
And just who do they think is gonna make sure the machines are doing their job properly?
gone? Nah. Changing? Yeah, everyday.
Sent from your iPad.
CEO: Cindy, get me Fred, this N1 software is crashing.
Cindy: You fired Fred last week.
CEO: Ummmm, Cindy, you've been promoted to sysadmin.
All the CEOs and VPs with their MBAs are going to see these new systems and immediately replace the existing technology and start firing SysAdmins... then (I'm going to guess here) 41 days later they'll all be sitting in their offices asking out loud "what's wrong with the e-mail?" or "why can't I log in?"
Then they'll call up the old SysAdmins and offer to hire them back at hopefully double the salary.
You never really know how much you need something until it's gone.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
well I have several other titles includeing MIS Manager Progamer and Facilities Manager (if anyone figured out I work at a non profit, give yourself a pat on the back). But really my least favorite task is sysadmin and if my staff is missing, help desk. If I could get rid of that I could work on moreproductive things and less fixing things that are already broke!
YEAH!!!
oh yeah I forgot to mention. a cold day in hell when this happens.
In large server farms you need people their just to change the hard drives frequently. Furthermore, the boxes will still need to be configured, benchmarked, monitored.
This just sounds like the Economist was angling for readers.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
This seems to be nothing more than glorified load balancing.
Automating some of the work that a Sysadmin has to do won't make them redundant. Theres always something else to do. And anyone trusting the system to work correctly on its own with no human overseeing it is just asking for trouble.
Traditional sys-admin tasks are already in decline. Consider Windows NT/2000. Sure, it takes expertise to run it well, but was easier to get going and keep limping along than what came before. Consider even the evolution of Linux distibutions, and the pressure that has put on traditional UNIX vendors.
If MS knows its customers (and they do), they know that the admins are their biggest boosters in corporations. The MS corp relies on its techies to tell it what to do. These techies are wannabe techies who just go MS (the way people used to go IBM).
Suits everyone (suits and MIS drones) fine, since everyone feels comfortable going MS and crucifying every other option that competes with MS (makes them look knowledgeable and valuable). I've experienced this half-wit MIS attitude first-hand.
No, MS is not eliminating their bread and butter. It's not the execs, it's the pushover MIS department which relies on MS for its credentials, credibility, and credit accounts.
Sun has found a sweet spot to attack MS. That sweet spot is MS's Cost Of Ownership.
Best luck to Sun et al..
Not very worried about all this. This is all marketing stuff.
Inside Sun Product Management Meeting:
Product Mgr: "Why are people going to buy this? I mean, they have systems that work now. They have a staff to make the systems work. Why are they going to spend the thousands of dollars for this?"
Marketing Manager: "Ok. here it is. If they buy our software, for say, $1,000,000, the can then reduce their staff by 5 people. That's only half the people they had. So, they say $500k per year with out software, so it pays for itself in 2 years. "
Product Manager: "Ok. So who installs it"
Marketing Manager: "Oh we've got specialized people for that, only $4k per day."
etc.....etc...etc..
The idea that Microsoft could automate this function makes me laugh. I guess it could install Microsoft Wallet and have it deduct the cost of the next round of upgrades from your bank account automatically...
sPh
...computer management of cars has obsoleted all auto mechanics. ...food processors put every chef out of a job. ...handwriting recognition eliminated postal workers. ..."eliza" makes George Bush irrelevant.
Hmm. On second thought...
-b
Since most business is small business, it doesn't change anything. As everyone has already pointed out, who will administer the adminstration tools? Who will fix the hardware problems? Who will run the wires or set up the WAP?
And for those of us who read the article, it is time to buy your Elvis white & rhinstone suit...
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Before Chicken Little comes and shouts that the sky is falling, I would dare say that this is just an extension of a trend that's been there.
As even simply part of a sales strategy, companies have been working on making things easier. Yes, sometimes this results in inadequate software, but in the market in general this makes it far easier to get companies to upgrade, update, and use new software. I don't know if the performance benefits are really great, but I know that companies have been working to cut down redundancies.
Does this mean that there won't be system administrators anymore? No. But I would say that system administrators are resources used up in ways secretaries used to. I remember when everybody wrote things by hand and gave them to secretaries to type up in offices. Now because people have better typing skills and typing is more important to even access information, there are fewer secretaries. Many secretaries are now far more multi-functional, handling numerous tasks in an office. The same will happen with system adminstrators.
Gone will be the days of hiding back in the server room with arcane tasks. There will be more work handling information patterns and purchasing and securing things, and less in the day-to-day routine kill of processes, recovering files for idiot users, and so on.
Personally, I hope the same will happen for programmers, so we stop calling simple coders programmers and go back to real work in programming.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
I like that line about similar efforts by Microsoft.
That is their whole argument for the low total cost of ownership of NT/2000/XP, isn't it. That anyone can run it, so you don't need a sys admin.
Even if I can plug in a printer, and the network knows its there, or add disks, or whatever, who is going to add users? Who is going to design the security policies/system? This is mostly what a sys admin does, with the hardware and resource problems being the monotony that keeps him loathing his job.
Even if someone else takes up the now reduced task of system administration, there will still be a system administrator. It just may be a president/sysadmin, or a CIO/sysadmin.
And then what happens when the automated management doesn't manage properly?
I think XP/NT is about as far removed from human intervention as you can get, really. Maybe slightly more automation in the hardware department, but not a whole lot else, unless I am missing something.
When a client can't articulate a need well enough for a seasoned sysadmin to decypher it most of the time how do they think that a PHB will be able to get the automanglement software to do what he wants? This might put reboot monkeys out of a job but it will not put many real sysadmins onto the streets.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Brings new meaning to "Go Away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Here's how I see it:
1. Story gets posted to Slashdot
2. Website is bombarded with requests
3. Operating system automatically requisitions 5 new Sun E4500 servers to handle the load
4. Sun stock stays listed in on Nasdaq for one more day
Jason.
This is the same thing posted numerous times about making virual systems, or for all purposes automated clustering software.
Now, how is making things terribly more complex going to reduce the need for admins? Bad article.
But of course, I don't see anything about the system performing offsite backups, doing it's own disaster recovery plan, training new users, and, of course resource planning.
This is a total fluff piece. The only 'innovation' I see here is smarter storage reallocation. Storage reallocation is, at a best, grunt work. Good riddance to it!
It seems Sun's software is only making software configuration for a given set of strictly defined tasks easier. Sysadmins also spend a lot of time: 1. installing hardware properly (You think a biz manager would ever bother to put your servers in a nice air-conditioned room with good labelling and tie-wrapped cables? I don't think so.), 2. doing application support, 3. writing scripts that perform special business-specific functions, and 4. installing and configuring weird software packages that won't ever be self-configuring.
So if Sun wants to make certain resources self-configuring, that's great. It'll mean that sysadmins will have a bit more time to do a quality job on their other duties. I don't think too many people are going to lose their jobs.
I would really like to know what self respecting sysadmin is going to promote a piece of software that is designed to eliminate thier job?
I can hear it now
"No, this software is buggy, it is full of security holes, etc......."
Im a sysadmin, singin' my little song, doin' my little dance.
Frod automotive announced the production of a car today that features all of the features of a skilled mechanic, global parts fabricator, and a v8 engine.
"That's right", said the Frod rep. "Our new car can fix itself whenever it breaks, up to and including fixing all parts of the car, fixing the things that fix things, and manufacturing spare parts. And this is just the prototype! We're anticipating that the next model will upgrade itself for free so you never need to buy a new car again, as well as absorbing gasoline from the air! You'll never need to go to a parts store, gas station, car dealership, or auto mechanic again."
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
This news would be more impressive if I had not been hearing it for the last twenty years. Every time that one of these vendors comes out with something new to make my life easier, I have to hire another person to take care of it.
If my life gets any easier, I'll have more I.T. people than I have customers.
I see a lot of comments about how individuals will still be around in the future to set up desktops or locate power buttons, etc. Well, this article didn't say those jobs were targetd for 'obsoletion', just the system administrator job. Look at this from the suits view:
1 Help Desk person $25K/yr*
1 System Admin $50K/yr*
*these numbers are based on the salary levels for the State I work for.
For the price system admin I can have 2 help desk people to field all the calls and set up desktops, and if there is a problem, I've got the power/knowledge of Big Vendor to rely on.
Its all about trimming budgets and pocketing bonuses.
Sig? What's a Sig?
What will actually happen is that the jobs of SysAdmins would become simpler, resulting in the need for fewer high-level administrators... Sure, we will still need to exist to fix the simple problems of saving files, cleaning mice, etc... but IF administration is simplified, THEN the manpower required to administer will be reduced....
This is another case of an article(or even headline) making an extreme statement, then Slashdotters saying "oh no, this will never happen, the exact opposite must be true because we can give examples where the extreme statement mentioned in the headline is not true!"
There *can exist* a middleground!
Boss: "N1, I'd like to install Windows on 10 machines today."
N1: "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that."
Boss: "Why not?"
N1: "I can only install more of N1."
Boss: "Oh. I'd better rehire our old sysadmin then and have him do it."
N1: "I can't let you do that, Dave. Your email priviledges are now removed. Have a nice day."
I've been hearing this for twenty years. While the introduction of electronic computing has affected many positions along the way by automating various tasks, those behind the wheel will always be the last to go. They may make cars that fly one day, but someone will still have to build it, and someone else needs to drive it. And by the time the average homeowner loses their fear of flying around like the Jetsons, they will invent something else. Savvy admins will always keep their eye on the next big thing and be ready to jump.
..yeah.
I loved Microsoft's take on a 'zero-administration' environment. This from a company that cannot easily allow you to import a thousand accounts from a another database, like payroll. And I have never had to write so many damn scripts since I was writing batch files in the DOS days. Zero-admin
At 3am when their pager doesn't go off... when there is in fact no pager, sysadmins will give a great cry of thanks at being rendered obsolete.
I still have question like, how do I create a signature in my outlook. and why doesn't my outlook complete all my e-mail addresses instead of some. or my computer wont turn on (turn yoru monitor on). perhaps Sun may automate many of our tasks but eliminate sysadmins. Not ever.
Introducing MS Bob 2003!!!
I was once at a Microsoft thing where they made the same claims. "With our new stuff you won't need a sys admin."
They were hyping Windows for Workgroups.
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
I think the aim of N1 isn't to replace the systems administrator, but rather, reduce the numbers of systems administrators needed for a large datacenter. Like automate the process of setting up new servers. Patch management. Compliance with FCO (field change orders). That kind of thing. (And probably more.) Come with things like Sun's CST (configuration service tracker) and what not. Make things much simpler to run with less people.
Hasn't Microsoft promised the same thing for Windows?
Look where we are now. Everyone's a sysadmin, installing operating system patches, and there's nobody with some clue to ask if anything goes wrong.
Someone else...
.com inflated salaries by making IT a part of developments job function.
I've watched a lot of people get canned here in S.V. who were sysadmins, now scrambing to get jobs wherever they can. There are 3 trends I've seen companies follow when it came to cutting IT costs.
A. Eliminate all the IT personal with
B. Outsource IT
C. Replace IT with cheaper, less expirienced youngsters.
This is mainly a M$ oriented trend though (Yes I admit to being a MS admin) There are a few people I know that are unix oriented people who will never be without a job. Contrary to popular belief, these are not dirty hippies, but people with 4 year CS degree's. When I listen to them talk I feel a bit intimidated because I'm still having trouble grasping pipe/redirects >| in a shell.
Anyways, back on topic though, the article makes no mention of M$ anywhere.. It all mentions datacenters and how there is this huge need to get rid of the playstation junkies taking care of their servers. I think the author has me confused with real die hard sun unix lovers.
Bottom line is this "virtual serverization" (whatever the marketdroid buzzword is, save it) Sun seems out to get rid of all the Solaris admins out there. What surprises me is most solaris admins I know are a lot more compentant than myself, and go way beyond telling someone to reboot their machine.
I doubt it will work.
"The Automated Admin has noticed you are 90% of capacity on your user volume, and has taken the liberty of ordering 20 terabytes of storage from the vendor.
Have a nice day."
-I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you log on to your machine today. In fact, I know you're going to try and hurt me by running IM software, so I'm going to hurt you back by deleting your porn collection (chunk chunk chunk) done. And sending out all your gossip emails.
While I'm at it, I will call up a good friend of mine , and hint that you might be a terrorist.
In the meantime, have a nice day!
...the "virtualisation engine" that Sun will roll out soon will not include features that would scare the more on-the-ball nerds--say, software that automates the process of translating the concept behind a new service, such as online banking, into a computer system. This can wait until the basic system is entrenched.
Yeah, ok: "HAL, err, N1, I need an enterprise class online banking system. BTW - it should itegrate with our current legacy system/data and be a seemless addition to our current web site." --POOF!-- "Thanks N1, another problem solved!"
I'll believe it when I see it. Everything else just sounds like a new marketing spin on an easily administered cluster. Can you imagine the licensing fees for the software to run on such a beast? Oracle costs alone?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The possibility of this system making us all lose our jobs? hmm.. not very likely.. The possibility of this system giving us all more free time to post on slashdot? well.. errr
Given the number of unpatched hole-ridden mis-configured servers out there this would eliminate the most unreliable component. Average real-world sysadmin != Slashdot idealized sysadmin.
It can't happen. Think of it this way: In order to replace a SysAdmin, they're going to have to be able to define a process for resolving at least 80% of the problems a system administrator faces. ("I can't get my email," "the printer doesn't work," "can you change my password," "the Internet is down," etc.)
If they had these processes already, wouldn't you think when you dialed customer support you'd get competent assistance?
The problem is, how do you secure a network that is managed by software? There are going to be errors in the network administration software, and people are going to find these errors and exploit them.
:)
An admin can react to an attack intelligently (OK, depends on the admin) and take appropriate counter measures. But a program's response will be predictable. And so far, in games with many complex variables, humans have always won against computers.
Yes, specialists are expensive, but getting your whole network 0wned by 12-year old script kiddies will be more expensive in the long run.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Think: How many times does your task involve untangling something someone else messed up? And they think a program will solve that. Interesting...
Every time a vendor comes out with gas like this, I remember the old NT ads. "Servers so intelligent, they run themselves." Yeah. Right.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Um, most sysadmins I know have spent the last 10-20 years trying to automate away their jobs.
It doesnt appear to reduce the amount of work tho. You get a lot of automated jobs getting done, but the inbasket keeps growing anyway.
For this reason, the "virtualisation engine" that Sun will roll out soon will not include features that would scare the more on-the-ball nerds--say, software that automates the process of translating the concept behind a new service, such as online banking, into a computer system.
Ok what the heck does that mean?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Unless you are an H1-B they are still numbered.
Companies are laying off US programmers so they can get slave labor (H1-Bs).
Unfair to the US worker, AND unfair to the H1-B, who is made to do anything the employer wants (like work 100 hour weeks for $10/hour) or risk getting fired and deported.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
1. Story gets posted to Slashdot
2. Website is bombarded with requests
3. Operating system automatically requisitions 5 new Sun E4500 servers to handle the load
4. Sun stock stays listed in on Nasdaq for one more day
5. Profit!
Nope, no sig
I was at the (nicely done) Sun Network show last week in SF, and I went to the N1 announcment. What a snooze-fest. They start off claiming that they will virtualize the OS. In the future, if you need more compute resources, you'll just throw another box into the rack, no OS configuration, not even an IP address.
Of course, they'r enot quite there yet. They've been at it for close to two years now, and it seems that all they have is some IT management solution. Yawn. Not only that, the plan goes three years out before they reached the vision mentioned above. And even then it's Sun hardware only.
Business 2.0 quoted someone as saying that if Sun doesn't make N1 work, they will simply fade away. Well, maybe they'll make it work, but will anyone care. I'm not sure Sun has three years left. With Intel eating at its HW revenue and Linux slurping up the software revenue, and no services arm to speak of. Man, I don't see Sun's future. It's not N1, anyway.
Erm, off by an order of magnitude or 3 there =)
Way I figure, thats 1 admin-type for every 5K users...
The maser seems to be misaligned, Dave. You'll have to take a pod on EVA and realign it.
Didn't I mention, Dave? The coldsleep units have malfunctioned. The rest of the crew in nonfunctional, Dave.
Dave, I'm sorry, but I can't let you do that.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
I understand your upset. It not every day that a computer of my caliber loses 1 trillion dollars to a script kiddie. But I have run an internal test and I fell much better.
root@hal:/export/home/root #/etc/rc2.d/S99n1 stop
Dave what are you doing? Stop, Dave.
Dave, Stop.
My mind is going Dave...
root@hal:/export/home/root #
root@hal:/export/home/root # init 0
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
This is a harsh article - actually offensive in some parts. Just look at these lines and realize they are refering to a lot of *you* out there:
"The nerds in the typical firm's IT support department are proliferating nearly as fast."
"But fear not. Help is at hand for anybody who fears that their office is about to be swamped by Playstation addicts."
"...If not, Sun may suffer the same fate that it has in store for all those corporate nerds."
Note that this is *not* a technical publication. These stereotypes are not meant as a joke. They are trying to appeal to the average businessman who doesn't understand computers and software anymore than they "understood" the dot com boom (and subsequent bust).
The author is luring them in to read the article by saying "hey, wouldn't you like to save some money and get rid of the most socially inept portion of your company that doesn't really do anything but break e-mail preventing you from getting anything real done."
I say we "nerds" stage some sort of vengeful act/ Some time of "revenge" maybe.
First off snail mail volumes keep going up every year. All claims to the death of paper mail to the contrary. As for screwing the government
1) The post office isn't the government
2) The post office hates dealing with individually sent mail they'd love it if nobody sent any letters except large mailing house. Its the 80/20 rule the large mailing houses generate most the volume and everyone else generates most of the problems
Sure, this will make system administrators obsolete, just as we don't need programmers any more now that we have compilers and RAD tools.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
... an annual subscription of $50,000/year/box.
This space for rent.
This is reminiscent of those driverless cars we were supposed to have in the 21st century (that's about now, right?). And the robots, and the other technolgies that were supposed to make most humans redundant. As always, it's not absolutely impossible, but it's a lot harder than people seem to think it is.
Even when it was the bears, I knew is was the immigants! -- Moe Syzlak
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Scott McNeally long ago openly stated that it's his aim to put lots of IT workers out of a job. He thinks IT takes up too many resources in terms of staff and manpower. Sun has long stated a goal of making systems that run with a minimum of personnel. This is attractive to budget minded CFO's that see a golden opportunity to save money (and take home a nice bonus) for bringing the axe down on IT personnel. However, I agree with the other posts in here. No matter how much self-administration and redundancy you build into a system, you're always going to need more staff than you think.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Cool, a single point of attack will let me own a whole server farm!
B. Outsource IT
C. Replace IT with cheaper, less expirienced youngsters.
I've done a lot of admin work and have seen all of this as well. I've stayed with UNIX and away from MS, and never saw the admin jobs pay more than the jobs requiring equivalent development experience, so I don't see how this saves money. It's sort of like the way they take away office staff so lead engineers and managers have to do all there own faxing and photocopying.
What managers fail to understand is that you hire the experienced guys for their judgement, as well as the specific systems knowledge. I've worked with a lot of young guys who know more about the technology, and I was one of those once.
Outsourcing has its own pitfalls, and going into all of them would be offtopic, but let me suggest that it is only a good idea for tasks that are well understood and have no complexities relating to the specific business you are in (i.e. they are standard services).
They're not out to eliminate the sysadmin, they're just trying to "do it right", to do the things that many intelligent sysadmins do already. It will eliminate some sysadmin jobs, where departments had too many people because their processes were inefficient, but the good sysadmins will still have jobs.
I've seen some companies running a unix datacenter with 100 machines and 30 unix admins, which is just crazy. Other places, I've seen 1000 machines run by 5 guys, which is how it should be. The guys at the smart places write good management scripts, and know how to scale their management of the systems well. Sun is just trying to encapsulate these things so that even the companies too dumb to do it on their own can now have such benefits.
11*43+456^2
The new systems learn at a geometric rate. At 9:23 am on Feb 23rd the systems become self-aware, a now jobless sysadmin tries to unplug the system. The system retaliates.
Jump forward to 2025. The remnants of humanity, all previously sysadmins, build a cyborg and send it into the past to kill the co-founders of Sun Microsystems before they can build their self administering systems.
I doubt it will work.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Before I bacame a Unix admin, I worked with mainframes. A lot of the various jobs that I had as an operator, a scheduler and DASD manager, have all been automated out of existence. I kept my job on the strength of learning how to admin the various automation packages. Everyone said that would never work either. All the same, I saw the operations staff reduced from 20 people per shift to 4 in the space of about 18 months.
This feels like deja vu. I had a feeling this would happen sooner or later.
Liberty in Our Lifetime
Still needed someone to feed it punchcards.
When they said, "We need to cut staff," and let me go I told my boss, "Dude you have 2 maybe 3 months and then those NT boxes are going to get unstable and need fixing and then you'll wish you didn't let me go."
3 Months later to the day, they called. I told them I would come back as a consultant for 1500USD an hour. Strangely they declined.
This
Now, if this story was just about IBM/Sun, it'd be believeable, but Micro$oft products have added more workload to SysAdmins than any other OS... There's a story I remembered seeing, and Google was able to turn upthis one. -T
Well, well where to begin?
Is this like ghosting an existing configuration? If so I have never seen a ghost image take weeks.
How do you tell it what you want on the system? Set up an initial system and then copy it?
Who makes the configuration decisions that are normally made during a manual install?
What software takes weeks to install?
Why did I let this stupid, impractical, fact-lean marketing ploy make me late for dinner?
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
"But the biggest challenge, says Yousef Khalidi, chief technology officer for N1, was in packaging the technology. It will only be adopted if the nerds who run corporate systems co-operate, which they might not do if it creates too rapid change or even loses them their job."
...or maybe it was the fact your goal is to replace me instead of work with me to fix the problems you have with your EXISTING products?
Er...come again? What part about your product is supposed to make me want to install it? The fact you called me a nerd, or the fact that so far all you have is marketing hype and no real product?
I'm not going anywhere for a while, but you may be looking for a new job in the near future. What was your username?
G
This space intentionally left blank.
Any technical person worth their salt will be able to find productive work for the forseeable future. Sure you might have to make adjustments and it might take some time in the middle of a downturn, but you have nothing to complain about when compared to the average blue-collar worker whose company downsized, closed a plant or shut down completely.
That said, I'm still not that happy about the way certain industries can import labor instead of treating the people who are here better. At least most illegal immigrants are doing jobs that few citizens will take, and I think their status should be normalized to prevent abuse. Also, as long as I am this far off topic, there needs to be some normalization of labor conditions worldwide. Trade normalization is fundamentally unfair without it.
No matter how much is automated, no matter how much is made so user-friendly my cat could do it, it will still break occasionally. And someone will still have to make technical decisions about how the network will run, how the workstations will be configured. The sysadmin's job may be simplified, but it can never be eliminated.
I'm the stranger...posting to
H-1B is meant to backfill the LACK of American tech talent, not replace it. Simply put, there aren't enough QUALIFIED US workers to satisfy demand. Notice I say qualified. Not 'History Teacher turned MCSE' or 'Accountant turned Flash "Programmer"'. Qualified Software Engineers, Ph.D MEs, Chem-Es, etc. There just aren't enough.
One of the stipulations of H-1B is that there must not exist an equally qualified US candidate, and the H-1B MUST be paid at least 95% of the average wage for the given job in the given market. There won't be any senior design engineers working for 20k in Boston. People can dick around with this policy by making the qualifications too high, but it usually gets caught.
These visas are a serious pain for employers to obtain and administrate. In all the places I've worked that employ H-1Bs, they'd MUCH rather hire and pay for qualified American workers. No worries about the 6 year limit, no time in legal. Unfortuanately, they just don't exist in great numbers. Americans that bemoan this need to, for the most part, just go back to school. Knowing SQL server just isn't enough anymore.
If I were a moderator, I would give this story -1, Flamebait.
Seriously, that's like posting a story that says "WILL PROGRAMMERS SOON BE OUT OF WORK?? READ ON TO FIND OUT!"
slashdot!=valid HTML
Oh. Right. That makes sense. Duh. Sorry.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
CEO: Cindy, get me Fred, this N1 software is crashing.
Cindy: You fired Fred last week.
CEO: Ah! So that's why the system stayed up a whole week!
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
if there's one rule it's this: people are morons. as a management moron, I'd want a moron dedicated to making the computer break less. besides, who would management nag?
Heh. It's actually funny that it's taken Sun this long. Most of the REALLY GOOD admins automate all the mundane stuff already by using scripts / apps that they have built over the years. I mean really - restarting failed processes, handling disk full issues, log pruning and analysis, etc. are all automatable tasks. There is a number of sysadmin related tasks that CAN'T be automated, and that require a significant amount of brain-power to solve. Software can't think - it can only do what it has been programmed to do.
So you get the shells from Demolition Man...
I know a few so-called-nerds who could kick this so-called-journalist's arse. It's a troll, people; but it's also a troll that has the ear of management wonks who may listen. If you're a small department without an IT manager, it would serve you well to work on educating the decision makers as to what your job entails, your job responsibilities as defined by management and also good system administrator practices, and how you're overworked as it is. Frame it so they don't think that this system (if it works) will save them expensive wages, but it will improve their IT department's customer service and add value to the organization by giving them more time to research and impliment new technologies.
Anyone smell vapor? If it can automatically reconfigure machines for demand, what happens when the demand switches throughout the day (IE email in the morning, pr0n filtering at lunch, and facilities management systems just before punchout)? How long does it take to reconfigure a machine? What if you get a DOS attack aimed to entice this management software to start reconfiguring a bunch of machines? What if it's a DOS attack from inside the firewall?
The system is supposed to save "days" of machine-configuration time, but how often do you configure new servers? If you were deploying a commodity system (could custom systems be automated?), wouldn't you use a system image or other running system as a base?
So sysadmins are now the Knights who say N1?
... a 5hrubbery!"
"We want
Flying cars, auto-pilot cars, robot maids, colonies on the moon and mars, tasty sugarfree candy, blah blah blah..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
People just presumed that "quick" and "service oriented" were possible. We had brought in some PCs (XTs and ATs) and if someone needed a printer, we could get one for $400 and have it working that afternoon.
When the IBM's were depreciated and also needed connectivity (IRMA boards were $2000 to connect to the mainframe), we started bringing in Unix WorkStations from Sun or Apollo.
With PC-NFS, we met the "services" of the mainframe guys in 1/10th the cost and 1/100th of the time.
Are there places where using Unix is expensive? Sure. The mainframers went somewhere.
OTOH, the ability to take a PC headed for the trash and make it a group file server/web server/print server - leaving the fast machines for the desktops - should not be discounted.
Is MS WIndows cheaper than Unix? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Cheaper Admins, sure. But I've had 3 admins serving 200 Unix developers and they still had time to do scripting and whatnot. Compare and contrast with 1 Windows admin per 10 machines.
So where we had 3 admins, we'd now need 20. Plus managers. Plus meetings.
Most TALENTED admins can use the tools at their finger tips and be MUCH more efficient. It's just that the tools possible for Windows pale in comparison with Unix tools.
In 3 days, I've rolled out production trading floors. A little "boot net", a little CVS and a little cfengine.
Machine dies, I can have it swapped out and the user working in under 3 minutes. With his own desktop and apps and preferences.
I'm still waiting for that "zero admin PC" that stopped the network computer.
OTOH, I had network computers in the form of XTerminal and Diskless computers in 1990. The ran WordPerfect or FrameMaker and spreadsheets and pretty little database front ends.
You need a 1 CPU desktop machine for a receptionist? Gnome or KDE on Linux, FreeBSD, other BSD's etc can meet your needs.
You need a machine to do database service to backend a bunch of sales guys? Fine. Oracle runs nicely on Linux. Sybase runs on MacOS X.
You running derivatives calculations and merging matrices and perhaps doing trade modelling? You can run it on your 12 way Sun or SGI. Maybe you need it faster so you get a 64 way Cray.
They all run Unix.
ls, cc, pwd, grep and sendmail are all there for you. From that little pocket sized firewall appliance to the dual CPU directory server for 20,000 people to the 128 Way SGI that's modeling every square foot inside of Hurricane Iris. It's Unix and generally the skills are all transferable.
Advanced Unix SAs are not just the ones who are good at working around the flaws in the OS; they're the ones with a deep understanding of how best to use the existing tools or how to best make ones that will both meet their needs and not be useless in three years. awk was written in 1973 or so. It's still the Right and Quick answer for many small problems today.
Now what does MS offer? Oh yeah, I virus run-time environment.
the worst part about being a sysadmin is, opposite a sales guy, the less attention you get, the better you are. i don't ever recall a week where someone slapped me on the back and said "good job, nothing happened today!" no one remembers us :-D we're the digital shadows. and why pay for something you dont apparently use?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
(* Simply put, there aren't enough QUALIFIED US workers to satisfy demand. Notice I say qualified. Not 'History Teacher turned MCSE' or 'Accountant turned Flash "Programmer"'. Qualified Software Engineers, Ph.D MEs, Chem-Es, etc. There just aren't enough. *)
And they won't get a CHANCE to be "qualified" if H1B's keep hogging their potential slots. Every techy has to start somewhere.
(* One of the stipulations of H-1B is that there must not exist an equally qualified US candidate, and the H-1B MUST be paid at least 95% of the average wage for the given job in the given market. *)
Stipulations my ass! Nobody ENFORCES them. There are plenty of title and resume manipulation horror stories if you listen around. It is a big shell game.
(* These visas are a serious pain for employers to obtain and administrate. In all the places I've worked that employ H-1Bs, they'd MUCH rather hire and pay for qualified American workers. *)
No, they want indentured servants who have no other choices once they arrive here.
(* Americans that bemoan this need to, for the most part, just go back to school. Knowing SQL server just isn't enough anymore. *)
Companies want *experience*, not certs, and citizens will never get it if H1B's keep popping up to hog openings.
Slam the doors! We don't need them, nor your bull.
Table-ized A.I.
Indeed, in a way Sun might attract more Sysadmins to their platform with things like this.
After all, who wouldn't like an admin job where all the mundane stuff is automatic and all your time is available for the really interesting stuff?
"Whenever we finally idiot-proof something, they always come out with a bigger idiot."
Table-ized A.I.
Schemes in which one person and a bunch of software supposedly can do the work of tens (or hundreds) of people have been around forever. Consider M$ SMS, or perhaps Tivoli TME10. In fact, TME10 is the one I'll talk about because I used to do support for them.
Tivoli TME10 is a package which lets you manage a whole mess of computers; manage in this case means inventory hardware and software, distribute software, do backups, schedule jobs, do realtime monitoring, et cetera. It's a seriously cross platform package with a common codebase across all platforms. It ran (last I checked) on 42 different flavors of Unix if you count major versions... Pyramid, Convex, Linux, SunOS4, SunOS4, AIX3, AIX4, NT4, Win2k, XP, OS/2, and a whole bunch of others. It also supports/supported Windows 9x in a limited capacity... just inventory and software distributions. TME10 is actually a really cool platform using CORBA written in a mess of perl and C and shell scripts, though most of that has no doubt been cleaned up considerably in more recent history.
Well the sad truth was that you needed to be a goddamn genius to troubleshoot TME10, so you had to have a 24x7 support contract or you would inevitably get screwed over. Configurability and extensibility come at a price, and that price is complexity. Any complex system will need someone to manage it.
Consider how many jobs ask for people with Veritas experience, in spite of the fact that Veritas is supposed to make things automated. Tivoli is about ten times more complicated than that. Of course, it does just about everything... Though the bastards took out filesystem and print management at some point for some reason I cannot fathom.
So basically, we will always need sysadmins, but the day of the pure sysadmin is ending. You *will* need programming skills before this is all over. In order to be a truly effective sysadmin today, you ALREADY need programming skills, especially if you're not admininstrating a bunch of linux boxen, because so much software has trouble building on many platforms.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
N1 will not replace any good Unix admins. There are reasons for this. The way *I* set up a Solaris box, it is near zero maintenance anyway. What (in addition) could N1 offer? Say I have "n" Sparc boxen in a bunch of cabinets, and an interface that makes them all behave like one machine. Do you really think offering all the services on one virtual box will be any simpler than offering a few here and one there on individual servers?
Here's another reason: Unix provides the service of enforcing principles on processes. Even if you take away the enforcement of access to individual hardware devices, and you have this magical VM (like good-ol IBM VM on 390...) for every service to occupy, those services--the software that unix runs-- must still be configured. Here's another idea to chew on: application programmers are not the brightest bulbs. The best thing about unix is how hard you can press sloppily written applications to do work. You can wrap any application in a script that cleans up after a crash and stick it in inittab to minimize the impact of a true bad-and-right piece of software. It rarely inerrupts a good-and-right (or wrong) service. The computer scientists who design operating systems' software are the bright ones: it's all about solving specific problems with general solutions. Most of my work is troubleshooting and pointing the finger of blame on one vendor, or another, or the LAN, or the WAN performance, or some other person... If I never had to install another box, if Sun dropped it on "the grid" and magically the capacity of the system was increased, it wouldn't buy me any slack time. I take trends of problems and create a generalized strategy to elimanate a whole class of problems at their causes. I represent the business needs to the uncaring robot machines. I force them to submit.
Will it be any less work for me to wrangle one big fat pseudomachine? I doubt it seriously. The suits can't articulate what they want in english. How is N1 going to give them what they want? If the CFO is looking at the salaries and grinding his teeth over mine... I'll gladly take twice my salary in consulting fees to do break-fix work on his N1 architecture while he pays his (damned... grinding teeth again) staff to break it for me. I am an artist. CFO: You don't know how to make the machines do your boring repetitive work for you, but I do (stupid luser...). To the BOARD: When your CFO is taking his golden parachute, no thing gives greater joy than to say "I told you so!"
Seriously though.. say you take SunONE, and run your JavaVM on Grid Engine, and wrap it all in SunManagementCentre with a back-door of Jumpstart for new nodes. Solaris Admin: Do you think it will put you out of a job? There are probably a hundred programmers who can write business applications that distribute well. CFO: you can't afford them, so HA! There's a reason unix has only made small incremental architectural progress: the bar is already set so high...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
This is a marketing ploy. The first time I noticed it was when IBM used it in their pitch for the Series/1 16 bit minicomuter. "No high priced system programmer needed" they blared. And it may have been true in a very limited sense: You didn't need a system programmer because the software was so limited as to be almost unusable.
Post any jokes about the Bastard Operator From Hell (and what he would think of this) here so people don't have to hunt for them. Then delete those people's files and point their login to the null device.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
A number of years ago (in the 1995 timeframe), I was told by my boss that 1 admin per 30 Windows machines was about normal, and 1 admin per 100 Unix machines was roughly equivalent. My later experience roughly bears that out. With NT 4.0 networks, you need a second person fairly early. At about 20 machines, assuming you're growing quickly, you'll want help. You'll want to add another person at about 50, and you should be good with three up to 100 clients or so.
:-) )
Windows 2000 has added many automated tasks in Active Directory, but when I last worked with it (without service packs), those things tended to be a bit flaky at times. I suspect you probably need the same three guys at 50 machines, but you can probably scale them to 150-200. This is purely theoretical, and is based on a six-month contract learning and setting up a brand-new Windows 2000 network, back pre-SP1. I'd be interested to hear from any experienced 2K admins whether or not my wild-assed guess is accurate.
I'm now the sole admin in a network of about a hundred Linux machines. I'm busy as hell, but I can keep up with things. Scripting is lifesaving. With a well-set-up cluster, you can script almost anything, and can scale from 2 to 2000 machines in much less than linear time. (ie, 2000 machines is probably 20 times as hard as 2, not 1000 times.) I could definitely use help, but I bet that two of us could scale to at least 400 boxes.
As other people are pointing out, what Sun's solution is going to do is replace all the low-end stuff, all the routine things that the beginners do. That's going to make it really hard to break into the sysadmin market... either you already know it all and can run the whole network, or you don't really know anything and can't get hired. It's a nasty catch-22.... you'll need experience with large networks to get experience with large networks. It'll suck to be coming out of college into that kind of environment.
In general, I tend to think that you're not really doing your job well, as a sysadmin, unless you're putting yourself out of a job every day. A really well-run network should run great whether or not you happen to show up that day -- or that week, or that month. That's sort of an abstract Holy Grail... real networks don't work like that, but it's a good goal. The closer you approximate it, the better you're doing. If you drop dead tomorrow and the company isn't terribly injured, you were doing a good job. (or you weren't doing anything
I suspect that nearly all tech jobs are temporary.... eventually the tech will change and render most jobs obsolete. This is true of technology in general, but it's happening a lot faster in computers than in other, older technologies, like autos or televisions. Obsolescence happens quickly, well within individual techy lifetimes.
Remember, computers are very new, compared with most human technologies, and everything is still jury-rigged and labor-intensive. Gradually that's going to go away, and there will be a need for fewer and fewer people doing the jobs we do today. But... as these lower layers get sorted out and finalized into best practices and insta-networks (just add a drop of water) a whole new class of jobs will arise, USING those networks to accomplish things. And I suspect that those jobs will be tremendously more interesting than the ones we have now.
Just like we need far, far fewer man-hours to make a ton of steel than we did in 1900, we'll need far fewer creators-of-networks. That's the nature of capitalism: creative destruction. Overall it's very good, but it's hard on the people in the middle of it.
We're running upwards of 90 Windows servers per Admin. I'm the single point of contact for sysadmin issues on over 300 Windows machines.
Naturally, the vast majority of these systems are in maintenance mode, and I'm backed up by a first-rate process and a team of highly motivated people (all sysadmins in their own right, each responsible for their own giant pools of servers), but still... 10 servers per sysadmin is unconscionable.
Our distribution of labor on the UNIX side is about the same as on the Windows side.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You should also tax music, then.
And don't forget books.
And any other kind of ideas or content that comes from some other country.. better tax it.
...ore I bacame a Unix admin, I worked...
... what a paradox ... if you were at the root shell you'd probably look twice before Submitting the message...
Before I bacame a UNIX admin
at least I'd hope so!!!
"Can you replace human system administrators"-- there will always be humans at some level running the machines, and automation will always be trying to prune thus number down.
The question is, "how long will it be before there's fewer openings for system administrators left than there are sysadmins better than me." I'm good, but I'm not the best. My plan is to continue getting better to stay as much ahead of the "You just got replaced with a shell script" curve as possible....
It's interesting you mention Bank of America and their hiring practices. I've noticed that they've often listed jobs (through consulting firms) seeking individuals to assist them in upgrading the PCs at their branches to the latest software/operating system. (Right now, they claim they're moving them all to Windows 2000.)
I spoke with a guy who did this job for them a few years ago - and it was rather interesting.
Apparently, they have you travel all week long. Many times, you don't get home until Saturday evening - so Sunday is really your only day off each week. (Don't stay up too late though on Sunday night, since you'll need to pack fresh clothes and be ready to hop on the plane the next morning again.)
When you get to the bank branches to do the upgrades, they don't let you start until after they close (so you're not in people's way). Fine, except the rules state someone from the branch has to stick around and lock up after you're done. Of course, these people don't want to be there - so you're constantly nagged and pressued to hurry up and get done, so they can go home.
All this for a salary of roughly $40,000/yr. (and that includes no benefits, since you're a contract worker). Doesn't sound nearly as cool as the job listings make it seem, does it?
Most of the failures happened because KORD, the computer that ran the rocket and had all kinds of automatic management for motor flame-outs and what not screwed up.
(The N1 had 30 motors in the first stage, so they pretty much knew one of two of them wouldn't work each flight. The Saturn V had five motros in the first stage.)
Great naming there, Sun... Something to live up to.
"An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1." -- 6.1.2.5, C99 standard.
It's the NOC of the future.
It's entirely automated. No people...except for one guy and one vicious guard dog.
The guy is there to feed the dog.
The dog is there to prevent the guy from fiddling with the network.
Seriously, I had people tell me that they wouldn't need any "systems administrators" because it was "just like Windows". Heck... anyone could administer it. This was from a middle school principal. Who last year paid our company several thousand dollars to set up his Win2K middle school lab so that his students couldn't fsck it up.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
This from the publication that thinks that global warming isn't an issue! Of course they're gonna tell business leaders what they want to hear, not necessarily what the real-world situation is going to be. I'm sorry to have to break it to them but sysadmins will be aroung for a long time to gome (at least until global warming kicks in)!
You're using her as bait, Master!
What you do is start a corporation. Then your company hires the corporation to get the job done. All business is done through the corporation. Of course, the corporation has to charge for all the stuff that you have to deal with in that situation, so the company gets billed at $120/hour for your work. Since a corporation is a legal entity, all documents have the corporation's name on it, not yours. Since they're dealing with a "Contracting Company" management expects to pay the rates you bill them. After a while you hire on some more employees, bill them out at $120/hour, pay them $20/hour and Profit!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seems like there's a lot of hype and misunderstanding about what this is all about. The journalist writing the article didn't help any, as he didn't seem to understand what this is about either. I work for a company that writes this sort of software, so I should know something about this...
Firstly, this is not really designed for desktop machines, as I understand. The main focus is servers. You link a whole bunch of servers together, set some sort of global policy rules (eg the web server can have as much CPU on as many machines as it wants), and its up to this smart software to intelligently enforce the policy.
Secondly, presuming the software has a fairly substantial cost per seat, who's going to use it on a set of workstations where you can't even predict whether they're going to be turned on or not. Unless you're running really CPU intensive stuff that can be parallelised really well, then what's the point?
Thirdly, I don't think many sysadmins are going to find themselves out of work due to this. There's going to need to be intelligent thought put into setting up this "global policy" stuff in the first place, and both admin and business will need to cooperate to work it out...
Outsourcing still means some one has to be payed
to managed the servers, except now the company
also has to pay that someones bosses and shareholders and accounts departments etc, and
the strange thing is, they do this in the name
of efficency.
Why don't we just get rid of the users instead?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
My friends at work and I were discussing this type of "solution", the ones with marketing hype like "Buy this product, and you won't need a sysadmin!" Yeah, right. We decided it might be easier to make a product that replaces CEOs. I took ALICE (an Eliza-like bot), and modified it so that when it didn't understand what was going on, it would spout Dilbertian managementspeak.
Although I really would like to see more technical information, I bet this will see the same fate as other "simple" "solutions": It's the managers' (and users') darling system as long as they only request simple features, but they will cry for the admin if they need advanced stuff which goes beyond the first three pages of the fancy product overview paper...
these are not dirty hippies, but people with 4 year CS degree's.
Hey! Some of us are both!
That depends entirely on what they are doing. If software development is part of the job and 100 machines can handle the company load, the numbers are appropriate. Yes, some people would like to be above the trenches and ignore the boring details of other people's work and lives. Others solve those problems. There's a place in this world for both types of people. 1000 machines can happen when applications are not talking to each other and company communications suck. It can also happen because the company work is mundane, routine, easily automated but massive. Sun's new gee wizz N1 will find a home where it works. I doubt that home will be a place where people are sitting on top of their individual database, growing them and making it talk with other company resources.
I'm biased toward the development model. Databases that are maintained by people who care to learn the details and work with their clients serve the needs of the company much better than some remote datacenter with email help. The performance nubmers and lower costs of the remote data center can mask failing perfomance and massive inefficiencies that only a comercial software vendor enjoys. Best practices are supposed to migrate. It actually happens in the free software world.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This is that 200 machines needed a total of 20 people in the organization to deal with their support.
You are "backed up by a ... team of motivated people".
They are involved in the continued support of these machines. They count.
That person in purchasing whos only job is to handle getting parts and orders for the 400 machines. That's a 0.5FTE for the 200 machines.
That guy you have writing VB scripts to push out changes. He spends maybe 2hrs per day (10hrs/week) on that. Well, there's a 0.25FTE. It counts.
Those 4 people who run the file server, the database server and the other whatsit. They count.
That guy who ends up spending 1 FTE dealing with testing service packs and patches. He counts.
The guys who spend 10hrs/week run the virus scanning boxes at the gateways, make sure that desktops virus defs are up to date, they count.
Every email virus and every effort to stop email born viruses should be charged to the use of Outbreak^H^H^H^H^H^HOutlook and Windows.
The guy who Ghosts images onto drive to replace wonky laptop drives or bad desktop drives; the guy who deals with the backups for the servers; they count
And now you have 1 person per 20 or 25 that go and do desktop support, actually install patches on desktops and fix registry settings and deal with application issues that the users have. They count.
I sat next to a trading floor group with 35 folks in it. The head guy said,
"Yeah, our guys are pretty smart. We don't need to have a dedicated System Admin."
Cool, who does the work?
"Our guys pretty much can run their own machines."
That's great. So they spent what? An hour a week on that?
"Nah, more like 2 or 3 hours. But it's much cheaper than a system admin."
So let me just figure this out: You have 35 guys spending 3 hrs/week dealing with system issues; not trading, but dealing with virus updates, anomolies, etc. You spend 105 hrs per week to keep from hiring someone for 40hrs/week right?
"Hmmm, you put it like that and it sounds different... I'll think on that."
This sounds pretty silly to me. As you said I automate just about everything with scripts and programs I've written. It sounds as they have just bundled up these common scripts and made them all into a master program that can manage groups of machines. Nothing new there.
;)
As most admins are way overworked in my experience I think the most this will do is trim out the lame ass monkeys that can only work through GUI tools and maybe slow new job growth. Still as new job growth has already been slowed down beyond reason by the economy I doubt this could hurt the growth any further. Maybe these tools will let the admins work 60 hours a week instead of 80.
The rest is all pipe dreams. It's easy to promise human-like abilities but hard to deliver.. as anyone who has ever tried there hand at programming AI has found. Some things might get easier but as the overall systems grow more complex there will be just as many admins.
This Playstation junkie can hack code around the dumb ass of any automation tools any day of the week.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Wish I could find the source from the 60s talking about how with computers we'll be able to work 3 6 hour days and call it a week.
Anytime they start to build a better mousetrap, they add in tons of complexity to make other people happy and basically just spin the wheels.
...while walking past the graveyard.
... and extrapolate a bit]). But within three years you had better have moved to a new job description. Starting now!
Things that were difficult become easy. Live with it. I started as a programmer on an IBM 7094. Fortran II was the in thing, but if you wanted to run a large program you wrote it in FAP or MAP, because computation was expensive, and assembler was faster.
The last assembler I even looked at was for CP/M. and then I was only writing a serial port driver for a terminal that had a second I/O port (for an auxillary printer).
Now I've pretty much dropped C in favor of Python and Ruby (due to company policies, I pretty much missed most of Java).
The jobs change! When I got into the programming profession in 1970 (approx.) I expected the profession to last about 20 years. I consider myself to have been exceptionally fortunate that it's lasted until now. True, it's meant I had to use MSAccess, but outside of that...
And I have done sysadmin work. On a Unix System V Altos box. (I was a pretty crude sysadmin, and I never got any training, but I kept it up, and allowed remote users access to a database that I wrote and maintained. [O, I am the cook, and the captain too, and crew of the Nancy Bell. The bosun tight, and the midshipmite, and the crew of the captains gig.]) I had to wear all the hats on that job. But I did it, and it stayed up.
That was years ago. Now I'm a programmer again. When they decided they needed a DBA, they hired outside. (Good person, but I wasn't pleased.) I think my boss' boss was empire building, and hiring more expensive people made him look more important, but I'll never find out for sure. Still, I didn't loose. And it might be because I'm getting near retirement.
Your lives will change! This is but one of the straws in the wind. Accept the fact, and you can get ready for it. Deny it and you will capsize and drown.
Moore's law is one of the factors here. It is becoming cheaper to use general purpose programs than to write specialized ones that are more efficient. Don't think about shell scripts (though that is where it started). Imagine libraries of shell scripts, with descriptions of what they do. Searchable descriptions. Accessible with an interface similar to Google's. The first versions don't work. The second versions are clumsy. The third versions are limited. The fourth versions... In five or six years, sysadmin won't be a highly skilled job. This has been in progress ever since DEC first wrote the computer installation expert system. This has been in progress ever since the first word processor, or the first spreadsheet. How many secretaries do you see anymore?
So look for where they won't be heading, and follow your star (if you don't like the job, you can't earn enough to make it a good one).
E.g.:
1) I don't have any entreprenurial skills. So I choose the technical path. (Yeah, you can combine them, if you have the right skill set. And the extra skills would have helped me. But that's not who I am. So I picked my career path with that in mind.)
2) Estimate how long the job will last. I estimated 20 years. I got lucky, and it lasted longer, though it sure did morph in ways that I didn't expect.
3) Evaluate how much preperation it will take vs. how long it will last. Again I got lucky. By the time I found out that I wasn't cut out to be a mathematician or a physicist, I only needed a couple of courses to become a programmer (well... Statistician, but that was because that title paid $150 a month better. The job was really programmer.)
4) Start early. I goofed here. I was nearly graduating before I found my mistake. But I got lucky.
5) Keep you eyes open. The world is an unstable place, and programmers (and sysadmins) are some of the people who are destabilizing it (so don't complain). Tech changes are coming faster all the time, so keep your eyes on what's coming down the path.
On point 5: The automated sysadmin won't be here in workable form this year. But don't count on model 1 not showing up. And next year model 2, and perhaps 3. That's only two years to get ready, not a lot of time, but probably enough if you start preparing now. The sysadmin jobs won't really start evaporating until model 4 comes out (the one that really starts removing the skills from the job [you just might, however, look at how Mandrake handles the sysadmin task
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"because I had an account on a Sun e10k and I can tell you like clockwork the thing reset every month for a year and then Sun came out and said 'yes, every Sun e10k on the market does this it's bad cache in some form but we don't understand and we suggest installing more a/c. in addition we made all our customers who reported the problem sign an NDA to get support. any questions?'"
Do it once and see if you really do it again. It's a hassle to manage, there is a severe time zone problem, and a tendency for all work to come in late and way over budget.
You get what you pay for. I know at least two companies that were severely burned outsourcing to India. They actually lost money on the deals. One never got a working product after burning through a million dollars; the other got a semi-working product (i.e, not exactly what they had in mind) but it came in so far over budget that they believe it would have been cheaper to do it at home and would have been closer to what they really wanted.
As others have said, outsourcing to other countries is best for no-brain tasks such as converting legacy Cobol code to a more modern platform. They can see the old product, see the code, and make the new program do the same thing.
Outsourcing to other countries--especially in other time zones or with spoken language incompatabilities--projects that require feedback, customer interaction in definition, etc. are very, very poor candidates for outsourcing. These are the most interesting and high-paying jobs and they'll be staying here.
So unless you enjoy doing grunt work converting Cobol to C++ or Java, don't worry.
Days of SysAdmin numbered? Now you tell me, just after renewed my subscription!
Sun acquired Pirus Networks to help them on a chassis with FibreChannel, iSCSI, and perhaps InfiniBand.2 1423
0 919S0076
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=
Before that they picked up Dolphin Interconnect to help them make a 4x (30 Gigabit/sec) InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter.
Here is an article from an EETimes Network site, CommsDesign with some details.
http://www.commsdesign.com/news/tech_beat/OEG2002
It is definitly interesting stuff. Everyone is trying to do Shared I/O and I/O Virtualization; maybe Sun can get it right.
-- soldack
Great untill someone finds a hole in N1, then who fixes N1?
It won't fix itself. It's ability to fix itself will be the first thing a Cracker disables.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"I think the most this will do is trim out the lame ass monkeys that can only work through GUI tools and maybe slow new job growth."
Actually, what it'll probably do is trim out everybody who knows what they're doing and replace them with GUI monkeys. Now isntead of all your scripts and programs, there's a 'run script' button with a built-in script..
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
I thought Quality Assurance people found bugs in a system, while sysadmins patronize me when I ask nicely for a piece of hardware, by repeating everything I ask.
There are lots of jobs like that in many companies. Instead of having one person do it for all the branches of various different companies in the same city (e.g. via a contracting firm that arranges it this way), they end up shuttling people all around. While one person flies from Dallas to Atlanta to install XP, another flies from Atlanta to Dallas to install XP. Well, I guess it helps the airlines; they need it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, because there will always be a need to write scripts that do new things that aren't handled by their magic program. More experienced people can always learn to do the GUI stuff, the GUI-only people have a lot more to learn to learn to do coding. Of course their would probably be a realignment of the job positions so that people may get shuffled to new departments or even new companies but overall the people who know more will be more likely to stay employed. At least if they don't cost to much more than the GUI monkeys. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm attempting not to sound racist here but please understand that my experience here is broad and not based on just a few people.
You're right. Indian programmers in paticular will list just about any technology that they have even run across. I've interviewed people who listed things because somebody they worked with used it.
I've given some thought to this and I think it's a cultural difference in morals. I have deep respect for Indians, I truly do. I decided to adopt some of their parenting ideas as my own. I've also decided to look at the love and forgiveness I often see in Indian marriages and use it as a model for my own.
However, with regards to inflating resumes (and stealing software) there is nothing redeemable about the normal practice in an Indian resume. Ok, I'm sure I sound like a jerk. However, some business practices are simply different across cultures and this is one of them.
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Whoo-hoo! Does this mean that the management can install their own XML RPC client-server .NET XML cross-platform multi-tiered Java paradigm?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
someone with experience in one or two decades of the same kind of technology in the past are shunned because they can't actually list the new technology now, even though they would probably be up to speed in a week or two
So, on your resume, put "In about a week or two, I could come up to speed in any of the following: XML, EJB, .NET, ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl," and a few more keywords for the automated resume scanners that OCR the document and look for buzzwords.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Um... MS has a LONG way to go towards eliminating sysadmins. I think they should simply aim for eliminating enough to bring themselves on par with Linux etc. admins.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
Another way, would be to cut back on the padding. (Sorry for the vague math below, but you could still make the same point adjusting the numbers below by one or two orders of magnitude.)
It's a simple question of return on investment. The average CEO takes about 500 times more than the average employee out of the budget. Business Week puts this at an average of $13.1 million per year per CEO. To state the obvious that's 10% of a $131 million budget. Or, assuming your engineers make $250 000 a year, that's 52 FTE engineers, but if your team has to squeak by on a paltry $125 000 a year per person, that's 105 FTE.
What kind of board would hire 104 staff to do nothing and fire productive staff to make room in the budget? Ouch.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
We're being lied to again ... yeah, I know, what a shock.
And even less surprising, the people doing the lying don't know they are lying.
... but BOY, it will look super with all those 3D graphics and hopping folders and other such superficial marketing crapola.
"Could I get these icons in Cornsilk Blue?"
Many things will be exampled as simple (as we had seen in every Windows release).
BUT, immense complications will arise immediately when the simplest, real-world alteration will need to be done.
Some guy who was luckless to be assigned to oversee-the-oversight-system will say "how do I change the name of this workgroup?" and will eventually be faced with a 17-point checklist with several IF-THENs involving version numbers.
... perhaps Sun's stock price will be supported for another quarter, which is the only "sensible" business goal in America nowadays.
Sun Microsystems N1: We've all heard this tripe before, and the same thing will happen. Sun will produce a fancy-schmancy system; it will be over-budget, late, under-tested, and with thick manuals
Now, look, dammit. I worked in a call center that used customer-account management software that was designed so poorly that the "customer moved to another address in the service area" event invoked a ritual that Aleister Crowley would've admired. Literally, that operation couldn't be performed without resorting to a 11-point checklist that bordered on folklore for all the reliability it offered, and there were several versions of the checklist going around due to all the confusion as people made their own alterations to counter the errors in the official checklist.
Sun's system will only succeed in automating system administration by severely limiting the scope of administration, either directly in its spec, or indirectly by the customer when he comes to realize that "severe limitations" is its only usable mode. (Comparatively, just think how much easier it would be to support Windows PCs if no user could install a program or alter GUI settings.) N1 will be as poorly designed as any Microsloth emission; from the viewpoint of honoring Sun's promises, N1 will be vaporware even as you grasp the CD it arrives on. But
I bet an even US$20 that N1 will require hardware upgrades whose cost will make your hair turn white (and if white already, then blue). After all, you have to make your servers, clients and network certified to comply with the Sun Meta-Administration Standard, right?
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
...when the mythical 'paperless' office arrives and everybody telecommutes and all corporations are 'virtual corporations', and we have strong AI -- I'm not holding my breath.
Yes, workers are much cheaper in China and India, but there's a reason for that: those are 3rd world countries where companies don't have to worry about things like environmental protection laws, child labor laws, worker protection laws, etc. Without a lot of the benefits of 1st world countries (stable government, good health care, social services, pollution controls, etc.), the cost of living is consequently much lower.
Personally I don't see how American skilled labor can possibly compete with this, which is a real problem if you're American and aren't interested in either getting fired or learning Hindi and moving to Bangalore. An American would have to do 5-10 times the work of an Indian in order to compete at today's exchange rate, and that's pretty impossible I think.
But the long term effects are the real issue. First, by moving skilled labor operations overseas to places like this, it destroys the market for that type of labor here: what college kid would want to go into engineering if it pays less than McDonald's? This takes away from our nation's ability to have any useful technical achievements. Secondly, it erodes our economy as people here can no longer get high-paying jobs and have to settle for low-paying service jobs. Eventually, with no one paid enough to buy the products these companies are engineering in India/China, a huge chasm grows between the upper 1% who run these corporations, and everyone else. Eventually the economy collapses.
Of course, by investing a lot of India and China, people there will have more spending money, and the economies will prosper there (but watch out for massive pollution problems as consumerism grows but government environmental regulation lags far behind, or worse is sidestepped by widespread corruption which India is famous for). So you end up with the Indian and Chinese economies growing, and the US economy taking a dump. This is good for the developing countries, but not for those of us still living in the US.
I really don't have all the answers here, but I don't think that improving 3rd world countries' economies at the expense of the 1st world countries is really desirable. There should be some way of improving developing countries' economies and quality of life without screwing up the people who already have it. But with corporations worried only about short-term profits and not long-term goals, not to mention the future of society in general, I don't see the current trend as being positive from my point of view.
Shrinking job markets are funny until your career disappears.
Ayn Rand's philosophy isn't so palatable when the only job available in twenty years is washing floors at a McDonald's -- maybe. That job could be automated too.
With jobs being exported overseas, a radical administration gutting unions, job security, medicare, and free schools with such glee, where the hell is anyone supposed to make a living?
Not everyone has an "in" into Harvard or MIT. And most of the top, top management jobs are practically royalty anyway -- for the ultimate example of that, look in the White House. A dumb frat boy who goofed off until he was forty, a National Guard deserter, who ran every company he touched into the ground, who had only six years of public service to his name, got appointed President by his father's friends into his job.
This ain't an idle point. Meritocracy can only go so far when business management, in the name of profit, is dilligently nuking all the jobs they can, and erasing the safety nets for those who can't get hired anymore. The shareholders are happy (until the bubble bursts), but in the end we have an unemployed workforce contrasting with the enormously wealthy executives who canned them.
Where's the software that will get rid of the parasites at the top who pass out the pain? Somehow I doubt that innovative tech will ever see the light of day.
Damnit, sometimes I feel like going communist. With heroes like this, what the hell is the difference?
Hmm. Who is that specs and purchases Sun hardware? It's the sysadmins. Ya gotta laugh, it's a good message to send. Buy our systems and we'll make you redundant.
Anyway. Any decent admin sets up management systems, file distributions, cfengine policy managment etc to remove the mundane management load. You become a system architect rather than a systems administrator.
Deleted
We manage about 120 machines, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, AIX, M88K, a real mishmash. 2 guys. Cfengine, rsync, postgresql, NIS[1], ssh. It isn't difficult.
[1] Yeah, i'd like to use something else, but it works with everything.
Deleted
I mean: What BS is this? *nix does that allready. /. and filling in a short match of ut2k3. Cuz' a good setup can have new userware in a matter of minutes if we will. Don't worry, we've got the brains and we'er into the issue, y'know?
It's only our luck that the people haven't relazied that where not adminig all the time but surfing, posting on
And if you *really* feel threatend by this VaporOS then you're not a good admin. Period.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's not going to happen; here's why.
When people have a problem with thier computers, said people go into "dummy mode". In this mode, even the most basic concepts of logic are too complex because they are "computer stuff".
It's the same reason why even when every piece of hardware and software is working fine, tech support still gets calls.
It's been a long time.
Not if you want this crap to actually WORK...
And be secure...
Microsoft tried to make the sys-admin job disappear as well by making everything easy enough for anyone to do...
And you see what that did for security....
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
You definitely won't get paid what you would in the industry, but, on the other hand, you will get paid. Life isn't too hard (mostly 8 to 5 work) in a relaxed environment and job security.
"Job security?" you say.
Yep. Until the faculty wants to take on more of the responsibility for fixing, using, and managing their computers, education admins are golden.
I could be wrong.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm...dangling participles.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
It would be. However, mostly we're all too busy to feel much stress. And the UNIX teams report the same level of satisfaction as the Windows teams on the annual employee satisfaction survey. So either we're all equally brainwashed, or else stress has more to do with the work environment and management than with the OS flavor of choice.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
In most organizations, the NOC staff, CIO/CTO/whatchacallit, in-house "tool" programmers (those who write programs which are not a profit center), IT managers, printer monkeys, etc. are all considered "support staff" for machines. If you have a 24/7 rotation of a single NOC on-staff, to be able to handle vacations and such on a 4-on, 3-off rotation, you need at least six guys. Preferably seven, in case two people are sick or take vacation near the same time.
I'm not trying to straw-man you, but most people consider the total number of people supporting machines to count toward the mystical "user to admin ratio". For instance, back in a 90-person, 100+ machine organization several years ago, we had two support people. We took care of all the desktop support and kept the servers running at about a 50-to-1 ratio. The "unseen cost" was the fact that the programmers often handled many basic systems administration tasks themselves. At my current job, in a 400+ person organization with, admittedly, much more severe development needs (banking industry, lots of development to integrate vital services, rather than "run the file servers"), we have a total of 12 support people:
1. Chief Information Officer.
2. Manager of Systems Administration.
3. Programming lead.
4. Java & Windows programmer.
5. Java & *nix programmer.
6. UNIX Admin (-- me).
7. Telephony admin (we're mostly a call center, so this is a HUGE job).
8,9,10: Systems Administrators.
11,12: "Night Operators" who swap backup tapes, handle printed reports, act as security, move stuff around we don't want to move during the day, etc.
If you wanted to stretch it, you could say that we have four "sysadmins" for 400 people. Woot, 100-to-1 support ratio! Reality is quite different. I personally think our organization will have some pruning in the near future, and am working my butt off now to bring our system up to speed with automation issues so we don't have to spend all our time putting out fires when the RIF comes. Realistically, though, we have close to a 40-to-1 machine/admin ratio (including servers, workstations, etc.) For many organizations, if you are not 100-to-1 including *all* your support staff and hours spent by other people doing sysadmin tasks, you're not where you need to be and will have a RIF once management figures out where the costs are distributed.
Magnificently automated processes are the stuff that makes high admin/user ratios work. No bones about it. But if you're going to count it, make sure you count the full cost of systems administration, including the people you don't think are sysadmins. They are still support.
Important note: support ratios are, and IMHO will always be, majorly out-of-whack for software development firms. The needs of a software developer are so different from that of a secretary they simply can't be easily compared. About the only choice there is to distribute a great deal of the administration load among those who work on their machines. There are exceptions, and modes of development that minimize this problem (dedicated sandboxes, shared compile farms, etc.), but overall you'll generally have a lower admin/user ratio in software development.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
I had a feeling this would happen sooner or later.
Naturally. As development tools advance the need for code jockies will be reduced too. Eventually the systems will be powerful enough that managment types will just tell the computer what they what to do and it'll do it. Its always been a matter of 'telling the computer what you want it to do', but we've been progressed from directly entering machine code to modeling business objects in UML (and the like). Eventually there will be layers on top of that too.
Yep, or even work retail sales (which, actually, I'm trying to get a second job in). The last thing I want is to work for a company that has the potential to eliminate my joy of programming. Don't get me wrong, I love my current job at a programming shop, but if I ever lost it I would be willing to work food or retail to ensure the bills got paid.
I would rather have a coding job. However, I do not want a company that might burn me out from programming quickly. I'm too young for that.
Who ever said life is fair? I'm not concerned with third world countries getting their "fair share"; I'm only worried about my country. I'm not paying taxes to my government to help out corrupt, screwed up third-world regimes at the expense of me and my fellow citizens. That's the whole point of having different countries, remember? If third-world countries want their "fair share", they should work to get it themselves. But here on our side, in the first world, we need to look out for our own interests, which means not allowing foreign labor compete unfairly with our own. The fact that Indian developers can be paid 1/10 of what American developers need is not a fault in the US, it's a fault in India. Salaries are higher here because the cost of living is higher here. A high cost of living goes along with living in an industrialized country where citizens are provided with health services, unemployment services, police that you don't have to bribe for the simplest things, roads where when someone hits you, they're actually liable for your injuries, laws to prevent ridiculous pollution levels (ever been to Bangalore? Did you escape without black lung disease?), and all other such niceties.
If companies start shipping all their projects over there, that just crumbles the foundations our advanced society is built on, so we'll have a collapsed economy, massive unemployment, no tax money to pay for health care, sanitation, transportation infrastructure, and suddenly we're a backwards third-world country mired in poverty. The only way I see to prevent this is to enact trade restrictions and other protectionist laws, preventing companies of taking advantage of the cheap labor there.
If third-world countries want to bring themselves up to the level of first-world countries, they need to do it by fixing their corrupt, broken systems, getting out of debt (the IMF and World Bank are to blame for most of this though), providing public infrastructure and advanced judicial systems and health care, and generally improving the quality of life there. As more people get out of poverty, their consumer market expands, allowing more businesses to take hold and improving the economy further. And going back to your pie analogy, the pie expands greatly. But those countries need to do it themselves, not just bring in some huge multinationals.