The death of the sysadmin has been predicted for years – we're not holding our breath We've seen a slew of claims lately once again predicting dire times ahead for IT system administrators: if they're not under threat from AI and outsourcing, they face an increasingly demanding work atmosphere. IDC suggested there will be a slump in sysadmin jobs. That said, outsourcing is perhaps going out of style. …
Sorry elReg, but you lost me at 07:56. Is there nowhere safe from the Cult of Woke:
Jessica Lyons Hardcastle (07:56): “And then once they're in the roles, how are they going to, whose, they need to be, there's need to be retention efforts too. So that women stay in these roles too. And then even to your point about A.I, making it more egalitarian, it depends on the models. I mean, we've seen bias over and over again in A.I and that's because it's not been fed good information. If the people training these models are usually white men then their's probably going to be bias in those models. So, you know, it's a larger picture, it's a larger issue than just using A.I to solve the diversity and inclusion issue.” (08:34)
That's not 'Woke', that's 'noticing that facial recognition doesn't seem to work as well for brown people' and 'noticing that voice recognition doesn't seem to work as well for people who don't have American accents'.
You know, observing reality.
@Sora2566: "You know, observing reality."
Is there any hard factual evidence for this and is it down to racist white men? I mean the Chinese manage facial recognition and well .. they're not of the Caucasian persuasion. From the quoted text, it seems to be de rigueur to assume white men are intrinsically racist. Reminds me of a similar story regarding blood oxygen monitors and how they didn't work on brown people because the original designers were white and therefore racist. As if anyone designing any kind of diagnostic instrument would not test it across all ranges of usage.
Yes, there is hard factual evidence for this. For example, this study https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9534882, or Harvard discuss it here https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/
The issue isn't one of racism, but sampling bias. Training datasets have been biased during development, there have been technological difficulties with equipment (eg, look at the newer Pixel phones, they now have a specific technology to make photos of black people look real, and not the overly dark nonsense that phone cameras used to produce).
China is a different issue to the west. The population of China is 91% Han Chinese. Making the population much more homogenous than the US, UK etc... But also, China does indeed treat minorities problematically, just look at the internment camps in Xinjiang.
Yup. But, it isn't specifically "racism" today. It is a shortcoming in the technology. So, knowing that, we should use the technology with extreme caution, until unbiased data can be formed.
But then, deciding what is unbiased could well be where racism comes in...
And I'd wager that their facial recognition systems are less reliable at identifying caucasian faces - minorities tend to be neglected.
And it's minorities in terms of "existing data", and the existing data inevitably contains current bias (training on a prison population for instance embeds the bias that exists in the current judicial system.
Getting unbiased data is a difficult problem - it's not insurmountable, but it does take active effort.
Deciding whether to retain your sysadmin is easy: Is your system working?
Questions not relevant: With whom do you have sex? Which bits dangle or don't? How much melanin do you have? Do your limbs all work? Can you warm this chair up? Anything with "AI" in it.
@ChoHag: “Deciding whether to retain your sysadmin is easy: Is your system working?”
Just acquire an air of vague superiority and use the words blockchain, cloud and A.I. in every sentence. A former college of mine use sell cloud solutions, now he's selling A.I cloud solutions /s
I stopped the minute they started bitching about salary disparity. This was not one minute after touting the knowledge in the head of a typical, experienced, sysadmin.. That knowledge doesn't come easy and it never comes cheap. I've been a system and/or network administrator for 35 years. I've leared quite a lot over that time, and unfortunately, most of the perennially useful knowledge was gained in excruciating and time-consuming lessons. In that time, I've never met anyone with the anywhere close to the same experiences as I've had. Vendor hardware and software, campus size, office density, etc., none of these are even remotely similar, company to company. Therefore, if a pair of jobs for which I'm qualified are posted, there's no reason on earth for me and another equally qualified applicant to be offered the same salary. If you think you should make more money then demand it. You'll either get it (and I don't care) and stay, or not get it and leave (again, I don't care.) I have never based my own self-worth on what my co-workers earn.
Therefore, if a pair of jobs for which I'm qualified are posted, there's no reason on earth for me and another equally qualified applicant to be offered the same salary.
It depends how similar the pair of jobs are. If they are identical they duh yes, the salary will be identical.
"...the knowledge in the head of a typical, experienced, sysadmin."
This!
Back when I was working my colleague and I were turfed out to make way for some people who apparently came at a lower cost. It didn't go well from what I heard.
The thing is; me and my colleague had built the systems from the bottom up. We knew where the bodies were buried and all the little quirks and foibles of the system, This was in a financial call centre, remote from our head office, in another country, so we more or less had carte-blanche to set up the server room. Any down-time would have meant a considerable loss to the business.
We left and as Terry Pratchett so elegantly put it "The fewmets hit the windmill" and chaos ensued.
Karma can be a bitch.
The death of the sysadmin appears to be the new version of "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop"
When there are no sysadmin roles left then a Linux desktop might be the thing might still work.
The BOFH strikes me as being in the honey-badger class of indestructable. It would appear he has assisted a few to their highly deserved eternel rest with the judicious application of therapeutic defenestration.
I imagine most SAs would have embedded sharpened nails into their occupational cluesticks.
Like Twain, the BOFH might remark "The report of my death was an exaggeration’ doubtlessly adding "those responsible..."
There was a comic made ages ago about a completely automated factory that only had a Boss and an employee, the employee was just there to get yelled at because yelling at machines is just not the same.
As long as companies prefer to blame people over machines and AI, sysadmins and BOFH will never die.
I couldn't make much sense of ML models being "written" by persons of north european heritage and male.
AFAI understand models are trained and of course the results would be dependendant on the training sets.
Bias in the sourcing, selection and weighting of these sets could well reflect the biases of the persons responsible for these choices which may well include those predjudices implicitly inherited from their backgrounds.
Having seen some of the output from chatgpt and its ilk I wouldn't imagine any but the most brain dead white supremacist would want to own such shite.
Makes as much sense to me as claiming gravity affects equatorial african peoples unequally because the law of gravitation was written a white englishman (Isaac Newton) [See equatorial bulge.]
"Correlation is not causation" obvious to those not fully retarded.
The title: a nod to Dorothy Parker whose wit extended well beyond her demonstrating the use of the word "horticulture" which today would, I suspect to her great delight, have her instantly cancelled.
Sorry but just like every industry it's full of numpties who sit just outside it and have only the vagueist idea what's going on at the grass roots level. I like many have worked in many companies and one thing unites most of them, they're all a fecking big mess, running on "sticky tape and blu-tak" replaced every so often by a dedicated team of techies who are all underpaid, underappreciated and overworked.
All this AI shite depends very much on have "clean room" or "green field" sites where stuff has been set up to actually run like clockwork, my experience of working in any company older than 15 years old is that it's a hodge-podge mess of systems that just about hold together through the daily prayers of the devs and admins.
Worried? Not me! There's always going to be piles of shit to shovel in this industry!!
Agreed. Do long as there are 7, or 10, or however many years of data required to be presented to the Tax and other authorities, there will be legacy data. Legacy data held on legacy systems. Legacy systems that never had the data copied to the new and shiny, because the money ran out at the end of the project. And some Mkt weanie keeps trawling through for "historical comparison" - never got uploaded to the cloud for BI or AI and the Mkt weanie only knows about Excel (if you're lucky).
There's your Duct Tape, Blu-Tak, Chewing gum and Tin cans with string. Forever powered by the blood, sweat, tears and beers (and hopefully no other bodily fluids) of your firendly BOFH.
Really could not agree more, this is exactly my experience in 40+ years of computing in many companies. Perhaps one or two companies were close to being 'clean', with proper well thought out and consistent standards and they just hum along with minimal effort. All the others are in constant fight or flight mode wasting endless resources trying to polish the turd. Mind you, keeps us in work :-)
In many companies, the pointy-haired middle manglement will latch onto replacing the sysadmins with AI as the best thing since sliced bread since they can finally lay off the expensive sysadmins and get a bigger bonus, as well as a nice kickback from the grifter^H^H^H^H^H^H "AI supplier". The adult-diaper-wearing C-suite will see this as "some sort of silliness from the proles, but they say it will save money" so they will support it.
It will all be OK for a month or two, until the AI falls over like Uncle Bob at a wedding's open bar, and business is disrupted. Then the "leadership" will be running back and forth looking for a neck to wring, and the AI supplier will be "This number is not in use".
As sh*t rolls downhill, the most junior mangler will be nailed to a cross, and someone will call the sysadmins desperately looking for a short contract to get them back to fix it. If the sysadmins are smart, they will take the company to the cleaners and grab enough money to immediately retire to the fleshpots of Spain.
Plenty of young start-ups founded by middle-aged and old specialists have been brought into this world exactly like that: manglement "cutting costs" and firing specialized personnell, and a while later, when the proverbial hit the air recirculation equipment; those specialists were brought in as external advisers at a befitting hourly rate.
The disappearance of passwords.
They have become part of the set but if, for example, Google stuff fails, it will ask me for a password, send me a text message and ask for their MFA code. All these things will be with us into the future along with new ones.
This is the same with actual humans in IT. How is an AI going to deal with the end-user who turns off their screen when asked to turn off their computer? How is a supposedly intelligent system going to cope with a panicking suit wearer who says "yes it is plugged in" when it isn't? Just the first 2 examples out of my head but there are lots more!
Until they can provide something as versatile as a human for less, we will be needed. Our jobs will continue changing but they will need someone.
We will sooner see the death of agile development, devops automation and CI/CD than the death of the sysadmin.
The rampant changes in languages, frameworks and service stacks will eventually be seen for what it all is: A terrible attempt at a cash grab by developers who don’t know how to actually program computers.
It’s becoming clearer with every passing year that traditional computing methodologies using well-tested stacks (e.g. LAMP, .NET) and deprecated toolkits (like WinForms, GTK2) still beat the pants off the modern competition in the majority of LOB use cases.
The truth is as much of an open secret in the IT industry as support for cannabis is in the horticulture industry. Naturally, until normal people realise they’re all being hoodwinked, we will all keep continuing to sell migration services!
SysAdmins aren't dead, they have just all rebranded.
Just relabel all those configurations you have saved "infrastructure as code, relabel the automation you sue to apply ai as "GitOps", and yourself as a DevOps Engineer.
Don't forget to demand a higher salary!
(07:52) “Women of Color” are not being denied positions primarily by “white men”. Women primarily prefer human interest jobs that don't interfere with their social life whilst men primarily prefer jobs working with things.
Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap: (trigger warning Jessica)
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This AI:ML is being massively over hyped. Reminds me of an incident where I had to deal with an idiotic request by management. They wanted to substitute the minutes taker at a meeting with a system of microphones in the board-room that would pick-up the chat, separate it by speaker, correct for ums, ers and aws and automatically type-up the minutes of the meeting. I had to explain the such a system doesn't exist out-side Star Trek. And even with AI:ML still won't.
--
PHB: Hal type up a report on our feasibility study and integrate it with what we know about what our competitors are doing and then send it to the board. Strip out all confidential company information and send a brief synopsis to the media.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.
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When the Singularity comes about, they'll always be a place for board-pullers :)
“The Age of Spiritual Machines” Ray Kurzweil
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