The sysadmin cycle of life is to get hired then spend several years fixing, consolidating and automating until someone decides they don't need to keep paying a sysadmin "for nothing".

No, that's a good sysadmin. Bad sys admins are indispensable.

There was a post recently comparing that to "the carpets are just naturally clean all the time, so we laid off the cleaning staff".

You ain't kidding. I found myself, a system administrator, in a large conference room, full of developers, meeting chaired by the head of development.

"The lifecycle blah-blah-blah for the infrastructure team," he said "Is simple. They rack the server and that's it. I mean, what else is there to do?"

Which was ha-ha funny at first. Then I realized he was _serious_. And most of his minions were nodding their heads in agreement.

I'm not a sysadmin but I ended up looking after the office network and you are 100% right about this. Not only that, by the time you know someone has a problem, they're already annoyed, at you, for no good reason. More often than not, it's their own fault.

The other day someone was complaining that the internet was slow (it was), turned out they were syncing dropbox, backblaze and icloud, saturating the network. I understand now why sysadmins lock down everything where they can :)

Sysadmins are the offensive linemen of the tech world.

A conpetent BOFH has many offensive lines always at the ready, indeed.

Thats kinda true actually :-) I am actually a coder by heart and moved now into a sys admin job. I kinda like it because once everything is nicely automated I did my work :-)