Damn I was just going to get back into this in like a week. Checked out their website a few weeks ago. I really like the Org
I hear that almost everyone on the board voted in favor of the dissolution. It was a pretty LOPSA-dead decision.
I hope the lopsa.org domain stays online
Unfortunately, this is not surprising. The profession has been trending sharply down since modern LLM AI has come onto the scene. Prior to that standard automation/resiliency practices has reduced the number of people needed for these roles lowering the demand and increasing the amount of endpoints that could be managed remotely.
While there will always be a "need" for competent IT System Administrators, the economic circumstances and impacts of AI have made the demand for those people who could become them now; almost non-existent.
There's a common misconception between demand in economics, and need. Many conflate the two improperly. Demand is where both parties in an exchange can come to a mutual agreement of exchange, this includes only the union of those with the resources capable of making the exchange and those with the qualifying requirements being met at the same place talking to each other without interference.
Need includes all the people (both parties) who are incapable of meeting a exchange for any reason including jammed communication channels from third-party interference.
The latter cohort is quite a lot larger than the former, and when money printing makes adaptation to this a problem for next quarter, no real negotiation can take place. Equally so, infinite cost imposed on both parties through a jammed communication medium (beyond the Shannon limit) forces similar failures as the sequential career development pipeline putting in 0 people as entry level sharpening teeth work is taken over by AI precluding a 10 year countdown to catastrophic failure of the profession. Every 5-10 years a good margin of people cycle out of a sector from aging/burnout/and other factors. Nothing in means nothing out.
Money printing can continue far longer than the pool of viable candidate factors can survive, which consistently shrinks when there is no economic benefit.
By the time any company will be forced to pivot, they won't be able to find the competent no matter how hard they try, at any cost. They are silently burning down the pipeline/distribution networks just like Atari did to the video game industry.
As it stands now, there's no real future in the profession anymore because you can't differentiate the competent upfront as an employer, in a job that takes a 3 month getting up to speed to learn the complex environment.
The competent end up leaving the candidate pool when no prospects are found usually within 1-2 years (given the communication jamming by ghost candidates/ghost employers; i.e. brain drain).
RNA interference in cellular networks applied to communication networks that have been systematically reduced/optimized for SPOFs in the job application process is something only a few have noticed.
How many times has your company gotten all the way to the end of a interview/vetting process in the past two years only to realize the candidates are fake and unhireable, and having to start the process all over again (at great cost).
I've personally heard horror stories about this happening, several times now, from different friends who work at the VP level.
Equally, I've experienced first-hand the lack of any opportunity or callbacks in IT over the past few years, with several thousand applications being submitted over the span with single digit callbacks.
I've a decade of experience actually doing this job, including architect/pm roles, and no ones hiring, and everyone says they are. The point where you have no visibility, and no one can react, is the short point of runaway before catastrophic failure.
What's objectively measurable says no one is really being hired, and communications have been compromised with no means to correct. Makes one wish they had managed to get a defensible space like a farm to ride out the socio-economic collapse that's coming for everyone.
A damn shame. I feel like the old guard sysadmin had some veneer of respectability and ethics around it (around the early 2000s, of course the early BOFH-era sysadmins were much more cowboy-like), compared at least with the modern devops, etc.
There was a whole chapter in The UNIX System Administration Handbook dedicated to professional ethics and ethical responsibility. These days, SREs and devops people will happily maintain the servers of any kind of company, it doesn't matter how much user data is legally or illegally[0] stolen — you just run the servers, why would you give a shit?
[0]: https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-news/new-research-hig...
I've been hanging around their discuss mailing list for almost a decade. Almost no traffic anymore (single digits per year).
People are still doing the job but move on to new forums. The "Sysadmin" job title tends to feel old-fashioned so people call themselves DevOps, SRE or Cloud Engineers these days.