I'm a bit of an odd ball in terms of background, and in my early 20's I interviewed for really interesting jobs at really interesting companies (Intel, oracle, Digital, and some more). Every single time the tech staff I would have worked with finished the interviews by saying "You just need one last interview with HR, it will be nothing, looking forward to work with you!".
And every single time the answer from HR was that " I would not fit in".
After 4 or 5 companies turning me down I thought fuck this, I don't want to fit in, I want to produce good quality work and make customers happy, and started to look exclusively for contracts. Thirty years later, I'm still contracting, every single of my customers has been very happy with my work.
Funnily enough, nobody tried to hire me as an employee in those 30 years! And they were right, I'd probably wouldn't fit in. I don't accept status quo, I don't buy in cargo cult, I'm not interested in coming in to wait for the hours to go by.
Remember, "fitting in" is not necessarily a good thing. People hire me because I don't.
The purpose of HR departments is to avoid liabilities. The purpose of rejecting “bad fit” candidates is to avoid losing their job if someone who looks or acts odd ends up being a liability. “You should have know he’d burn the building down. He was weird. He had a nose piercing!” So they avoid hiring anybody with a characteristic that could be seen as a red flag in retrospect.
Makes for very blend boring companies. Probably also explains some part of the "lack of diversity": This person is so different than anybody else we've ever hired, let's just say "They won't fit in". This is an easy loop to get stuck in, and can really hurt people from minorities or with different background.
Unfortunately, the word “diversity” isn’t usually used in that context in the corp world. Disruption is only something to talk about, they don’t want to actually do our, nor hire anyone disruptive to the current culture.
I got my current job without interacting with HR at all. Phone screen with the CTO. Phone screen with the engineering manager. In-person interview with the CTO, then the engineering manager, then the team I would be joining. In a perfect world, prospective employees (of any discipline) would have absolutely no interaction with HR prior to being given an offer, and HR would have absolutely no say in hiring.
The perfect world you're talking about has Personnel departments instead of Human Resources. Personnel departments deal with the tactics of staffing a company without the strategic planning that HR departments do. Interaction is okay. They just shouldn't be part of the decision making process.
It obviously fluctuates with the economy. For example, in 2009, I spent 8 months with not a single chargeable hour.
What has changed the most is the nature of the work and being able to work remotely. 30 years ago most people who "ended up" being syadmin were people who coulnd't write software. There was a lot of demand but very few people who were willing to commit to what looked like a "career for failed programer". Nobody would go to university with the hope to become sysadmins. Then sysadmin became a sought after job. People did mix of IT and CS in uni in the hope to become sysadmins. Then it became a commodity. Then it sort of disappeared. These days there is a lot of demand for "DevOps" (which means different things to different people). If you're interested in both the ops part, and the delivering software in the most automated way possible part, there is work out there.
Until 5 or 6 years ago, nobody, or at least very few people, were hiring remote workers. It still isn't the majority, but you can find remote contracts if you look really hard for them.
To give you an idea, 30 years ago I was the sole sysadmin (for UNIX machines) in a software lab, and was in charge of 5 AIX servers. These days I tend to be part of a small team and working on CI/CD pipelines, controlling resources and security on public and private clouds, help with the architecture of some solutions (CDNs, type of stores (redis vs S3 vs...) etc... You do need to adapt.
When I receive calls from recruiters asking if I know anybody who could do the same type of work, I contact my old sysadmin friends who often haven't worked for a few months, some of them who are often younger than me, they say they are not interested in that DevOps and those cloud things, they want to stay sysadmin, and some of them like to blame ageism for their lack of finding work.
> "DevOps" (which means different things to different people)
you're not kidding. at one company i worked at, it meant "let's lay off the support team and have the developers take tech support calls from the customers!".
> When I receive calls from recruiters asking if I know anybody who could do the same type of work, I contact my old sysadmin friends who often haven't worked for a few months, some of them who are often younger than me, they say they are not interested in that DevOps and those cloud things, they want to stay sysadmin, and some of them like to blame ageism for their lack of finding work.
It seems to me you're implying that, because they're unwilling to change careers from being a sysadmin to being "DevOps" (for any non-sysadmin meaning of that term), including programming against the APIs of those cloud things, their lack of work can't be due to ageism.
It seems to me you're also implying that, because they're younger than you, their lack of work can't be due to ageism.
Although there's some merit to the first implication, given your general thesis of the necessity of adaptation, the second holds no water. You may yourself be suffering from ageism and not even realize it, and ageism may not even apply in a linear, progressive fashion (nor on actual age versus perceived age).
Personally, I've also found traditional sysadmin jobs are an endangered species, but I'm unconvinced they'll go extinct. After all, those cloud things cost so many multiples more than running your own (even factoring in the cost of sysadmins, which may even be cheaper than the "DevOps" for the cloud services) that managers are bound to wake up and smell the savings.
> you're implying that .../... their lack of work can't be due to ageism.
I think ageism is a two-way street. Some people won't hire anybody over 30/40/x years old. Some people don't want to learn news ways, new technology hoping to keep doing the same thing they always did, until retirement.
What is traditional sysadmin? Once upon a time we used to re-compile kernel after changing parameters... and monitor handful of machines. There's value to own your hardware for companies that are large enough, but methodologies have changed.
I disagree that "ageism is a two-way street". Ageism is prejudice and/or discrimination based on perceived or actual age. How can that street go the other way? A lack of desire to learn has nothing to do with age.
Traditional system administration is approximately as varied as "DevOps", so I won't attempt to answer that question. However, I can easily answer what it isn't, and that's programming, which is what the vast majority of "DevOps" is today.
I'm not sure what your point is regarding recompiling kernels. Kernels are just a piece of software, and software (including kernels) still needs to be custom-compiled on occasion for a variety of reasons, though, of course, changing hard-coded parameters for static allocation of resources isn't one of them.
My point is that there's tremendous value to operate (not necessarily own) ones own hardware for almost all companies. To whit, "large enough" is actually very small, considering the prices AWS and their competitors charge.
As for methodologies changing, that is, of course, true, and not all have changed for the better, but, again, what's your point?
I'm a bit of an odd ball in terms of background, and in my early 20's I interviewed for really interesting jobs at really interesting companies (Intel, oracle, Digital, and some more). Every single time the tech staff I would have worked with finished the interviews by saying "You just need one last interview with HR, it will be nothing, looking forward to work with you!".
And every single time the answer from HR was that " I would not fit in".
After 4 or 5 companies turning me down I thought fuck this, I don't want to fit in, I want to produce good quality work and make customers happy, and started to look exclusively for contracts. Thirty years later, I'm still contracting, every single of my customers has been very happy with my work.
Funnily enough, nobody tried to hire me as an employee in those 30 years! And they were right, I'd probably wouldn't fit in. I don't accept status quo, I don't buy in cargo cult, I'm not interested in coming in to wait for the hours to go by.
Remember, "fitting in" is not necessarily a good thing. People hire me because I don't.