A lot of great ideas come out of twitter conversations, and one tweet inspired 'ahiro' to make an evolving article on Esotericsystems Blog that explains what sysadmins do, starting from square one.  He's looking for plenty of feedback so go ahead and give him some. 



He's already got a section on DevOps:

The new trend of moving development and operations closer together is an overall good trend. Operations needs more insight and understanding in development. Developers on the other hand need insight and understanding of the responsibility that operations carries.

While the fields are moving closer by using the same set of tools, the lines are not entirely blurred. Developers get broad access to monitoring and use the same tools for deployment. Operators however will maintain and configure the monitoring systems and they script the last mile of code that gets the deployment actually done.

It is only through collaboration that we can get that extra bit further in the future. It is not by heaping responsibilities on people untrained for the job.  --ahiro

He also talks about the admirable "coder admins" and the possibility of off-premise cloud services putting an end to "operators" as we know them.

Source:  http://blag.esotericsystems.at/2011/10/what-the-hell-do-sysadmins-actually-do/