> The sysadmin who can't write good, maintainable code is going to rapidly see their positions reduced to sinecures in large and slow companies.

I completely disagree, but respectfully. What I think we are lacking in this discussion is a differentiation between what we mean by sysadmin as a product and as a job description. Systems Administration is a aggregate management of the technical infrastructure. (for $reasons).

In super small technical infrastructure, such as webdev startups, there is very little active sysadmining to do if done properly, but as complexities grow, you need multiple people to perform all the various duties needed to maintain a system. In the performance of these duties, there are various descriptions with varying levels of requirements.

What I postulate is that traditional businesses in seeing the agility of the dotcom and startup culture have been attempting to cut costs in the technical infrastructure, but for the most part because the managers of the technical infrastructure (the sysadmins) haven't had anyone to advocate on their behalf, this has resulted in poor business performance bottlenecks.

I would be curious to hear what other have to say, but in the "shit-hot Perl slinger." days, usually the senior sysadmin was the slinger, and he reported directly to the CFO and CEO, if not ownership.

What I argue is that systems have gained in complexity from a computing infrastructure standpoint such that this old structure no longer worked well, hence the creation of the CTO/CIO class(very similar). The problem is, they aren't doing a good job in my opinion. Therefore, in this current business climate, my argument is that the main problem is we already have good code slinging sysadmins on hand (or can train them), but what businesses need/the industry is lacking, is business/political game aware senior sysadmins to make up for that failing of the C's. Hence I disagree the days of non-code slinging sysadmins are going anywhere. Indeed, some of the best senior sysadmins I know live in meetings, but if they are performing well in fulfilling that role, and not slinging code, but instead making big picture, high-level overview decisions and then monitoring progress, I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Now, if we got CIO/CTOs back on the right track, the political/business game demand could fall and those sysadmins could get back into hard work, (which just happens to sometimes involve code-slinging to solve problems.) Devs are an entirely seperate entity, but still part of the process, in anything other than a pure web startup type businesses with little to no real infrastructure (eg, workfrom home contractors).

Of course I want to qualify this in that this is ancedotal and I admit I haven't seen every environment, but I have seen many environments (as a contractor, seeing more insides than the guy going for retirement), from fortune 500s to 2 man lawyer shops.

Any business that can see this issue coming and address it head on will be far ahead of the game. Those that don't, will one day have very rude wakeup calls as the complexity exponentially increases and they don't have the structures in place the handle the demand, mostly due to lack of foresight/vision.