EXPOSED
The bread-and-butter of this job — account provisioning, patch cycles, log triage, backup verification, firewall rule edits, ticket resolution, runbook writing — is exactly what infrastructure-as-code, cloud managed services, and AI copilots are absorbing fastest; the same wave that killed manual server builds is now eating first-line troubleshooting. What holds is the physical and organizational half: racking and cabling gear, chasing an intermittent switch or AP problem across a building, restoring service at 2am when the automation itself is the thing that broke, and being the person accountable for an outage or a breach. No license protects this work, which is why the ceiling is modest.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 9 the split is real but lopsided: Ansible/Terraform, Intune, and cloud consoles already handle the provisioning, imaging, patch rings, and certificate renewals that used to fill the week, while the residue that resists — reverse-engineering an undocumented legacy dependency, diagnosing why VLAN 40 drops at 4pm, deciding what to sacrifice during a partial SAN failure — is maybe a third of the calendar, not enough for a 14.
Some physical or field component. A 9 reflects that you do rack switches, run and label patch cables, swap failed drives and PSUs, walk floors with a laptop hunting an AP coverage hole, and drive to the branch office when the VPN appliance bricks — but that's in server rooms, IDF closets, and offices with climate control and known layouts, not rooftops or trenches, and most days you never leave your desk.
No licence, no signature requirement. A 2 is honest: no state licenses systems administrators, and CCNA, MCSE, RHCE, or Security+ are hiring filters set by employers, not legal gatekeepers — after a breach the notification duty and the fines land on the organization and its CISO under HIPAA, GLBA, or state law, and your exposure is being fired, not being sanctioned by a board.
Some relationship component. An 8 accounts for the fact that internal customers ask for you by name, executives call your cell rather than open a ticket, and years of knowing which finance app breaks on a .NET update is genuinely portable capital — but the deliverable is uptime, and when an MSP takes over the contract users complain for a quarter and then adapt.
Meaningful discretion. A 12 fits calls that are yours alone with no procedure to hide behind — whether to fail over or wait, whether to isolate an infected subnet and halt a department, which backup generation to trust when the newest one may be encrypted, whether to push an emergency patch on a Friday — but the change window, the RTO, and the risk appetite were set above you, which keeps it out of the 14-plus range.
Has AI actually changed your work?