I think this is the key - selling yourself as a 'sysadmin' is like calling yourself a 'programmer' - it's a commodity.
Instead you're a site scaling engineer, or a cloud automation specialist, whatever sounds like it'll solve the client's problems - which these days are frequently that a bunch of developers set up the production environment on the fly and it just about works but isn't reliable or convenient.
I think the future for sysadmin work is definitely 'DevOps' - and it's not really that much different from old school sysadmin. Yeah a pure Chef/Puppet-managed system is more like writing code than hacking away, but behind it all it's the same kind of work.
It is definitely possible to bill US$2k per week or more as a contract sysadmin, but trolling through Craig's List isn't the way to manage it!
Instead you're a site scaling engineer, or a cloud automation specialist, whatever sounds like it'll solve the client's problems - which these days are frequently that a bunch of developers set up the production environment on the fly and it just about works but isn't reliable or convenient.
I think the future for sysadmin work is definitely 'DevOps' - and it's not really that much different from old school sysadmin. Yeah a pure Chef/Puppet-managed system is more like writing code than hacking away, but behind it all it's the same kind of work.
It is definitely possible to bill US$2k per week or more as a contract sysadmin, but trolling through Craig's List isn't the way to manage it!