We seem to do this every so often. What we have is a long tail problem. Here, have a made-up graph:

Surly target market http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2012/09/08/surly-target-market.png

Years of experience is not as good of a metric as it used to be, especially as more and more sysadmin types are code-types who are trying to glue/automate systems together through frameworks like puppet, and are getting their answers on StackOverflow (they have more puppet questions than we do, by the way). The career path of such code-focused sysadmins is a different one from those of us on the rack-n-stack side of things so they feel... developery, and their questions get VTCed a lot. Which is bad, since they're the feeder system to the surly target market.

The future of the profession is much more code-focused than it used to be, and chasing away coder-types is a great way to further the decline of the site. Or push us back into the arms of StackOverflow from whence we came. I don't ask questions on SO because I get answers back in deep dev-speak, which I have trouble decoding, and they're their own kind of antagonistic towards n00bs over there. Questions asked here select for an audience who thinks like I do, so the answers are more comprehensible. New automators are coming into the market with software-engineering training so actually get value from SO, unlike me.

The code-like nature of things to come makes it even harder for others to figure out what SF is for. We're more than the Systems Annexe of StackOverflow. Heck, we were given a moat when they took away the ability to migrate SO questions to SF. The fact remains that the surly target market we have right now came of age in a time when things were quite different in the admin space and up-and-comers do not sound like we did back when.

Thoughtful, narrow focused questions that show research and give relevant detail are hard to write. The author needs to have a grasp on the problem that's complete enough for discarded theories (provide proof, please), but not so complete as to know just what the problem is. That's a pretty narrow scope, and is our platonic ideal.

Questions like this one come from the beginner space: http://serverfault.com/questions/646007/how-to-perform-all-sorts-of-administration-tasks-both-locally-and-on-remote-com

Yes, that IS an incomplete understanding of the problem. They know it's possible, and are looking for the lead in how to solve it. This question didn't show research or trial theories.

If they had asked a question on how to configure WinRM to talk to other machines via PowerShell, it might not have been VTCed. That shows they're on the right path, but just need some help with an implementation detail.

Back in 2010 I would have answered a question like that without second thoughts. Today it took less than an hour to go from ask to closed. This is the kind of person that is starting out in systems administration. winrm is another tag with more questions on SO than SF. There is a reason for that.

We seem to do this every so often. What we have is a long tail problem. Here, have a made-up graph:

Surly target market http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2012/09/08/surly-target-market.png

Years of experience is not as good of a metric as it used to be, especially as more and more sysadmin types are code-types who are trying to glue/automate systems together through frameworks like puppet, and are getting their answers on StackOverflow (they have more puppet questions than we do, by the way). The career path of such code-focused sysadmins is a different one from those of us on the rack-n-stack side of things so they feel... developery, and their questions get VTCed a lot. Which is bad, since they're the feeder system to the surly target market.

The future of the profession is much more code-focused than it used to be, and chasing away coder-types is a great way to further the decline of the site. Or push us back into the arms of StackOverflow from whence we came. I don't ask questions on SO because I get answers back in deep dev-speak, which I have trouble decoding, and they're their own kind of antagonistic towards n00bs over there. Questions asked here select for an audience who thinks like I do, so the answers are more comprehensible. New automators are coming into the market with software-engineering training so actually get value from SO, unlike me.

The code-like nature of things to come makes it even harder for others to figure out what SF is for. We're more than the Systems Annexe of StackOverflow. Heck, we were given a moat when they took away the ability to migrate SO questions to SF. The fact remains that the surly target market we have right now came of age in a time when things were quite different in the admin space and up-and-comers do not sound like we did back when.

Thoughtful, narrow focused questions that show research and give relevant detail are hard to write. The author needs to have a grasp on the problem that's complete enough for discarded theories (provide proof, please), but not so complete as to know just what the problem is. That's a pretty narrow scope, and is our platonic ideal.

Questions like this one come from the beginner space: https://serverfault.com/questions/646007/how-to-perform-all-sorts-of-administration-tasks-both-locally-and-on-remote-com

Yes, that IS an incomplete understanding of the problem. They know it's possible, and are looking for the lead in how to solve it. This question didn't show research or trial theories.

If they had asked a question on how to configure WinRM to talk to other machines via PowerShell, it might not have been VTCed. That shows they're on the right path, but just need some help with an implementation detail.

Back in 2010 I would have answered a question like that without second thoughts. Today it took less than an hour to go from ask to closed. This is the kind of person that is starting out in systems administration. winrm is another tag with more questions on SO than SF. There is a reason for that.