this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Nailed it. I think about this a lot: a sysadmin is basically a manager of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers. But management is a poor way of orchestrating human labor; small teams usually operate better without management. So, is there a better way to administer computer systems as well?
That's a really interesting question, I don't know what that might look like.
As a biochemist, my brain naturally goes to the different hierarchical levels of increasing complexity in life. Like how eukaryotic amoebas are freed from some of the challenges that constrain bacteria (mitochondria really are awesome), and how similarly, the complexity ceiling is much higher for multicellular life than unicellular life.
I just think a systems view of stuff is neat, and it's cool to see how modularisation, coupling and specialisation work together
Span of control is always an issue. There's a reason why it varies heavily from team/org.
Since computers, unlike humans, lack intuition, I doubt that computers could organise themselves. So there probably always has to be a sysadmin, even if the sysadmin is a computer themself.