This isn’t exaggeration. To some extent, sysadmin types have always been expected to know more and do more than any other role. In some places we’re required to be subject matter experts in dozens of different IT domains, have great customer service skills for all the escalations, and master completely-unrelated areas of expertise such as electrician work, HVAC, plumbing, facilities tasks, and even carpentry.
But in the last decade or thereabout, it’s gotten so, so much worse. We’re expected to be expert developers in a dozen different languages while being full-time developer support, be masters of security, networking, design, architecture, three or four different cloud providers, and still be capable of all the other stuff above. And so much more.
I’m extremely smart. Not a brag, or if it is who gives a damn. Anyway, I’m in something like the 99.998th percentile. And I find keeping up with all of the above challenging. People who don’t have brains that big simply cannot do it.
Will AI help? I have my doubts. It just makes dumber people screw up faster and in less predictable ways from what I can tell.
This rant doesn’t have a point, really. Just some fulmination into the void.