You’re starting a company, or you’re managing and IT department.
Someone needs to keep the lights on, so you look to hire a Sysadmin, or a managed service provider (which is just a bunch of sysadmins paired with people who dont know how to speak Klingon)
Pause, and ask yourself the following question:
“Do I want a Sysadmin? Or do I want a Developer who knows how to be a Sysadmin?”
Turns out there are quite a few developers who also know how to do operations work and do so really effectively. The people who do this kind of work have had all sorts of titles: Systems Engineers, Systems Administrators, Unlucky Developers, Operations, etc.
You want someone who can automate backups, and testing of those backups in a way that removes themselves as bottlenecks. You want someone who can write the API you need for your developers to push code updates every single hour to QA and production, and do so in a reliable fashion (with rollback)
These are the people you want to hire.
Trust me.
The key question you have to ask yourself is this:
“How many people does it take to keep my operation up and running 24×7?”
A ‘decent’ sysadmin can handle more than 50 computers on their own
A ‘good’ sysadmin can handle more than 200
An ‘Awesome’ sysadmin can handle more than 1000.
The new name for this role is is ‘DevOps’ for Developer + Operations. They’re people who keep lights on, and ensure that you’ll keep the lights on if you get 1,000,000 customers tomorrow. The kind of people who will work themselves out of a job because they’ve automated *everything*. The kind of people who actually enjoy writing code that manages other computers. Yep. They actually exist.
Stop asking for what you think you want. There’s a whole other class of developer out there – begging for a challenge.