@iris_meredith Wow, this one makes me so glad that I wound up dipping out of programming into being an academic sysadmin, and on top of that I always had outside interests, even if a bunch of them were stereotypical nerd ones. The "sucked into programming work" could have been an alternate me where I wound up being pressured to work long hours and those outside things dropped away.

@aeva As a system administrator in a university (in a CS department) I feel my day job is probably somewhere around neutral. I would like to think I am making the world ever so slightly better by keeping the lights on and helping researchers and graduate students learn new things but I'm not sure I can be that optimistic about the typical output of academia.

I mostly settle for 'at least my work isn't clearly making the world worse'.

@maswan @eloy @gnomon My view is that management is somewhat forced by what staff they can recruit and what that staff can operate (which at a large scale is forced by budget, which is forced by politics¹). Increasingly I think universities (and lots of other places) will be forced to rely on existing solutions instead of building their own.

¹ as mainstream tech salaries get ever higher it becomes ever-harder for 'second tier' organizations like universities to pay competitively.

@eloy @gnomon I'm low key terrified of what's going to happen to my university over the next 10-15 years as an entire generation of highly technical sysadmins from the 80s and early 90s ages out and retires, with not very many replacements in the pipeline. We have so many home-built, inexpensive, bespoke systems that keep things going, but they really need programmer or system programmer level people around.

@eloy @gnomon I came up through the CS to university sysadmin pipeline (and currently work at a CS department). Even back then I don't think it was a majority pipeline¹ and it kept shrinking over time as outside jobs got better (both pay and work). Today the university can't really compete; what highly technical new people we can recruit have to really, really like the environment.

¹ people might start as university sysadmins but they leaked out unless they liked the environment.

@eloy @gnomon Also universities in the 80s: one of the biggest places computer stuff was happening, especially Internet/networking stuff. Universities today: a lower-paid backwater for exciting Internet, networking, Unix etc stuff.

In the 70s and 80s, a university job looked like a decently paid place you could continue interesting work after a CS degree, and better than many outside computer programming jobs (hello IBM mainframes). Today, the exciting jobs are outside of academia.

@Bwee I need glasses, but only a mild prescription. Once upon a time I could wear one pair for all situations and I wore glasses all the time. Now I need one pair for normal circumstances and another pair for computer/reading use, and it's a pain to swap between them, so a lot of the time I wander around away from the computer without any glasses on at all. Mostly the non-computer glasses get worn when I go outside, or at least significantly away.