Our last engineering job req we received about 10 sysadmin applicants almost all of which started with a "I know I'm not an exact fit but..." sort of line. Maybe it was just an oddity.
I think there's a reason, but it's not outright unemployment - yet.
On the enterprise side what I'm seeing are traditional sysadmin positions being eaten up by aggressive VARs and software vendors. They all have XaaS plays now and they're targeting their existing customers first.
The pitch is literally...
"Hey, I can save you $350K/yr. Just fire your ________ team and use our PaaS. We'll perform the migration for free."
Assuming the organization doesn't want to pursue their own internal or lower-level external service it leaves the sysadmins to either somehow make the leap to administering a provider system or diversify into other roles where they don't exactly fit.
