Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

A frontend UI person who can write their own backends is great. A backend developer who knows javascript and can build their own frontend is great.

A coder who manages their own cluster is great too, as is a sysadmin who who can write code.

And a developer who can do customer service, and therefore can fix a problem for every customer at once through modification of the application, is better than just someone who can answer the phone and make the customer happy.

All this is to say that someone cross trained will always add more value and will also cost a commensurate amount.

The sysadmin who can't write good, maintainable code is going to rapidly see their positions reduced to sinecures in large and slow companies. That may be enough to finish out a career, but I wouldn't bet on it if I was under 50 (and I don't bet on it; I have always, as said elsewhere in this thread, framed myself as "a developer whose output is configured systems" rather than "a sysadmin" for this reason). Similarly, in an age where infrastructure-as-code is becoming the norm, you had better be able to work with it or, as a developer, you are very limited in what you can do without being blessed by somebody else--and the set of environments where that's gonna fly is shrinking, too.

This is emphatically not to take any weight off of the shoulders of management, to be sure. But rather that I feel very strongly that what divide existed between these "disciplines" no longer exists, and both developers and traditional sysadmins need to move to catch up.

Of course, the more someone knows, the better. Knowledge and experience in any area of technology can improve understanding of all the others. But nobody has time to learn everything, and there's way too much to learn. Time given to learning more about sys admin issues is time lost to other potentially valuable knowledge.

It's a good area to learn about, and it is essential to being a strong backend developer, but through good architecture and management practices, there are still plenty of ways to make very high value contributions for a developer who hasn't spent much time focusing on sys admin.

I've worked with developers who fully understand the systems they are deploying on, and developers who develop for an abstraction of services rather than a real world environment - I tend to prefer the former to the later because the deployment process is much less taxing, even though the later tend to have better luck moving their software to another platform in the future.

But I'll echo you, every time I've learned something hard, it's because I got way out of my depth and had to learn how to swim all over again.

Same here, though I was aided by being able to be really confident about stuff when people came calling with the checkbook and a quick study once I'd landed a gig. I learned to do what we would now call "sysadmin stuff" (manual administration of hardware) as a kid because I broke my Linux machines a lot. Then I went into the web development gristmill for a while. Ended up leading a multi-platform mobile team with zero mobile experience because "you're a good developer, you'll pick it up" (I did); I literally went into a devops role knowing no Ruby (to say nothing of Chef) under pretty much the same rationale.

"Fake it till you make it" is real, but then you gotta make it. ;)