As an IT sys-admin, you’re largely correct. We are losing the essence more and more of proper sys-admin work.
IT staff are becoming more ecosystem maintainers than actual integrators and solutions experts. Instead of doing deep research on the problem and architecting actual solutions, many sys-admins just send off a quote request to a single external vendor and then call it good.
The research, quoting, planning, implementation, configuration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance are all outsourced. The sys-admins are just left with a simple web dashboard or desktop app that they often don’t even understand well, and a support line for when things need to get fixed/upgraded.
It’s a glorified help desk position in many cases. I’ve worked with several 10-15+ year admins that don’t even know how to spec out a server, how to architect a basic network topology, how to optimize a SAN or NAS solution, etc.
They go with the default without a second thought. Email = O365
Office apps = MS Office suite
Virtualization = VMware/Azure/HyperV
Servers = HP/Dell
And because they are used to it, it propagates onward. If you want to break out of that, you have to be intentional every step of the way.
On the other side of this, you have company’s that are in tangential fields looking to grab up a piece of that pie. Electricians, low voltage companies, fucking furniture companies (oh, we totally do audiovisual, that’s similar enough), the C-suite is trying to force their way into this new golden goose and expecting their staff to be able to handle this without training, time, or real hands on experience. And, no, a 2 day workshop from a manufacturer isn’t really “training”, at least not the only training needed…
As an IT sys-admin, you’re largely correct. We are losing the essence more and more of proper sys-admin work.
IT staff are becoming more ecosystem maintainers than actual integrators and solutions experts. Instead of doing deep research on the problem and architecting actual solutions, many sys-admins just send off a quote request to a single external vendor and then call it good.
The research, quoting, planning, implementation, configuration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance are all outsourced. The sys-admins are just left with a simple web dashboard or desktop app that they often don’t even understand well, and a support line for when things need to get fixed/upgraded.
It’s a glorified help desk position in many cases. I’ve worked with several 10-15+ year admins that don’t even know how to spec out a server, how to architect a basic network topology, how to optimize a SAN or NAS solution, etc.
They go with the default without a second thought. Email = O365 Office apps = MS Office suite Virtualization = VMware/Azure/HyperV Servers = HP/Dell
And because they are used to it, it propagates onward. If you want to break out of that, you have to be intentional every step of the way.
On the other side of this, you have company’s that are in tangential fields looking to grab up a piece of that pie. Electricians, low voltage companies, fucking furniture companies (oh, we totally do audiovisual, that’s similar enough), the C-suite is trying to force their way into this new golden goose and expecting their staff to be able to handle this without training, time, or real hands on experience. And, no, a 2 day workshop from a manufacturer isn’t really “training”, at least not the only training needed…