The US was once confident that demand for sysadmins would continue to grow over the next decade.
Now the Bureau of Labor's once positive view of sysadmins' future has been jettisoned in favour of a warning that "decline" is on the horizon.
In new figures about the outlook over the next decade, the agency predicts that the number of jobs will fall by 3% between 2023 and 2033. Its previous prediction was for growth of 2% (which is "as fast as average").
It also predicted that three other roles would experience "much faster than average" growth, predicting that the number of Computer Network Architects will grow by 13% over the next decade, Computer Systems Analysts will increase by 11% and Database Administrators by 9%.
The Bureau blamed the rise of DevOps and outsourcing to providers of network-as-a-service for the negative forecast, as well as noting the impact of AI.
Despite declining employment, it expects an average of 16,400 jobs for network and computer systems administrators to open up each year over the decade.
"All of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labour force, such as to retire," the Bureau wrote.
Is becoming a sysadmin still a good career?
We're glad to report that sysadmins don't need to start thinking about retraining just yet - although they may want to start sharpening up their DevOps chops.
The annual average salary of a DevOps engineer is $119,082 per year, while the average annual salary of a SysAdmin is $73,795 per year, according to the jobs site Indeed.
"Network and computer systems administrators will continue to be needed throughout the economy to maintain and upgrade computer networks," the Bureau added.
"However, some of their tasks are increasingly being done by software developers focused on DevOps (development operations), and some tasks are being outsourced to companies who provide Networks-as-a-Service. Additionally, systems administrators are increasingly automating routine tasks."
Making the change from system administration to DevOps
If you're a sysadmin who thinks they're unqualified for the jump to DevOps, then take comfort from a blog called "DevOps Engineer is the new SysAdmin" by John Rofrano, Senior Technical Staff Member and DevOps Champion at IBM,
He wrote: "I see job postings for DevOps Engineers that describe what is essentially a system administrator job with the added responsibility of running CI/CD pipelines or automating infrastructure deployments."
However, he advised sysadmins that a shift to DevOps involves more than simply a change of job title (and, we extrapolate, a big juicy pay hike).
"The job title of DevOps Engineer has little in common with the DevOps movement," he added. "I think you’ll find that if you change any of these DevOps Engineer job titles to System Administrator and read the description, it probably still fits perfectly."
"The reality is that DevOps is not a job title," he continued. "It is not something one person does or a team does. It is a cultural transformation on an organisational scale.
"It is the practice of development and operations engineers working together during the entire software lifecycle, hopefully on the same team, following lean and agile principles that allow them to deliver high-quality software stably and continuously."
Sysadmins might also be reassured by the many Reddit pages exploring whether their jobs are going to be replaced by DevOps professionals - which feature comment after comment telling similar stories.
In a thread called "Are you afraid that a DevOps guy will replace you as a sysadmin ?", one commenter wrote: "If you’re a good sysadmin, you’ll be asked to join the DevOps team."
"Happened to me," another said. "The pay is on another level."
