Awesome! Kudos for owning your own data and infra!
I don't think systems administration is a lost art, people just wanted to do things easier for less money and staff, and no one can blame them or the industry as a whole. The art is still right there, linux hasn't changed that much in 20+ years, I still have my first discs. It also takes some experience to "feel" your way through systems administration problems, working from the bottom up of course, feeling like its a network problem still has a high rate of success when troubleshooting for me!
I try everyday to teach some of these skills to people I work with, I just call it devops, or SRE, or some cyber cloud support position someone makes up, they are all systems admins/engineers to me still. I enjoy watching people learn and apply that knowledge to future problems, getting to the root cause or close to it, and the satisfaction that comes from fixing the issue from start to finish on your own, looking things up is not cheating in systems administration!
I would say they don't mostly suck, everyone of them who I have worked with has opened up doors that wouldn't be open otherwise. Made my salary go way up too!
So far ive dealt with bullies all my career at every company and i observe then challenge, then challenge again, im 2/3 getting them to quit...no need for hr or threats just be smart and trap em they never know who ;)
facebook had me as someone who could fill their quota for 1st rounds etc I sent an email asking them not to do this twice now. It is quite funny though, because every time I bring up NYC being the only possible location for me, the recruiter usually grumbles says its "tough to get into NYC" and then usually I get that the engineering manager "doesn't like that many people" I wonder how many people have been rejected working for Facebook because one person in NY doesn't like them? I mean that person might be amazing, but still seems limiting. They do fine anyway though, most of the hard parts have already been done long ago at Facebook I would suppose.....
I don't think systems administration is a lost art, people just wanted to do things easier for less money and staff, and no one can blame them or the industry as a whole. The art is still right there, linux hasn't changed that much in 20+ years, I still have my first discs. It also takes some experience to "feel" your way through systems administration problems, working from the bottom up of course, feeling like its a network problem still has a high rate of success when troubleshooting for me!
I try everyday to teach some of these skills to people I work with, I just call it devops, or SRE, or some cyber cloud support position someone makes up, they are all systems admins/engineers to me still. I enjoy watching people learn and apply that knowledge to future problems, getting to the root cause or close to it, and the satisfaction that comes from fixing the issue from start to finish on your own, looking things up is not cheating in systems administration!