Many of the comments seem to have relegated system administration to "code deployment" which is a gross understatement. Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are great configuration management tools but someone still has to do the configuring, and not configuring a system properly can be disastrous, especially for a startup dealing with financial information. Additionally, I feel that it's ridiculous and plain implausible to think that web application frameworks, e.g. Ruby-on-Rails, or a hosting companies, e.g. Engine Yard, Heroku, etc, should be responsible for your system configuration and network security.
Great rant, couldn't've said it better myself. Also, per ActiveState (Perl is still all over the internet), assisting in server management and powering websites and applications (not just the legacy ones). So there ....
Thank you for your reply, this is providing me with a great foundation for contemplation on what and how I should change my direction. The problem is that I can do a lot of things well and I don't want to limit myself by only showcasing one or two.
But I do know that too many options is usually bad (or atleast not optimal).
That being said, I'm a #perl regular so wheres my free shit. Alright, I'm going to count til ten.........., (wtf).
But in all seriousness, mst is a great developer and community leader, I only know this because I love Perl and always note CPAN authors and contributors of the modules I use. I was (am on occasion) one of mst's victims :) and I can say that when I was a newbie, if my skin wasn't thick, I would have been discouraged by him. Now I suppose Im a fan. That said, I wish we as a community could better cultivate the new and direct them to community projects they can help with. .... I suppose that might entail some stroking.
Thats a particularly easy question to answer, and the answer is convenience. Most people would rather call tech-support than figure out a problem themselves. Which is not unreasonable in this fast-paced results-oriented world we live in.