Real life stories tend to be more interesting than startup navel-gazing :)

True, although startup navel gazing is not as common as one would expect. Current top 10:

  Swift Playgrounds for macOS (apps.apple.com)
  Judge Orders Navy to Release USS Thresher Disaster Documents (usni.org)
  Where are all the animated SVGs? (getmotion.io)
  Stage is a minimalistic 2D, cross-platform HTML5 game engine (piqnt.com)
  How the CIA used Crypto AG encryption devices to spy on countries for decades (washingtonpost.com)
  N26 will be leaving the UK (n26.com)
  The coming IP war over facts derived from books (abe-winter.github.io)
  Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis (distill.pub)
  A popular self-driving car dataset is missing labels for hundreds of pedestrians (roboflow.ai)
  Investigating the Performance Overhead of C++ Exceptions (pspdfkit.com)

She's smart, a great writer with lots of experience to draw from, and a nice person to boot. They should!

From 6 to -2 karmic points! Controversial?!

There must be a lot of SysAdmins here.

We might not be making the news with flashy new tech, but we're here and we're many.. Quietly making sure systems work. :)

You need to call yourself SREs and start getting paid properly :-)

Tangent: I hate this trend of following titles like that.

To my mind SRE != Sysadmin; SRE is a principle of tackling "Sysadmin" as if there were no sysadmins- engaging software solutions and engineering to track recurrent problems with a top-down approach, often with little understanding of high-availability in hardware or OS design.

Sysadmin is historically a role of automation and reliability, but working from the bottom up. I (and others) make sure operating systems are not exhausted and that the hardware can support various reliability metrics.

Personally, I think these roles are complementary because an auto-healing system that has a stable platform is going to be more reliable than something that is very over-engineered to deal with hardware faults as a common occurrence.

I don't think title inflation is necessary.

Don't get me started on "DevOps" engineers. It's either rebranded sysadmins doing the same thing but maybe with some CI/CD. Or Developers who have been thrown to the wolves. Hardly anyone is actually using the "there are no fullstack people, only full-stack teams" mantra.

I don't disagree with your analysis, but my (semi-serious) point was rather that most good SAs could do both, and that there might be a pay differential between SA and SRE as SRE is more popular currently.

Aha, fair enough I didn't mean to seem overly critical. Even though it's tongue in cheek, I think you're right.

I just lament the truth of your statement. :(

I think good SAs more than anything else suffer from the "Our systems never go wrong! What are we paying those people for?"

> Don't get me started on "DevOps" engineers. It's either rebranded sysadmins doing the same thing but maybe with some CI/CD. Or Developers who have been thrown to the wolves.

This made me laugh! This is so true.

Name a better blog.