Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think about frontend designers (User experience people). They should know a little bit about TCP, SSL, HTTP, networking, monitoring, statistics, and everything related to frontend markup bloat, bandwidth, compression, etc. I've work with many of them, very good about Adobe products and Apple last thing, but clueless about, why their final code is of poor quality. Fortunately, many of them did get their Ego down, wh…
> They should know a little bit about TCP, SSL, HTTP, networking, monitoring, statistics, and everything related to frontend markup bloat, bandwidth, compression, etc. This is why Ilya Grigorik's book, High Performance Browser Networking, exists. It's a great reference to that end as well.
Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
71–80 of 424 posts
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#72I'd say there is too much effort in reasoning on the wrong problem. What worries me the most is the 'why': why do (too) many software developers don't know about sysadmin? I have been involved as a consultant in large software projects in the last two years and a vast majority of money lost in delays and bugs was caused by devs not understanding: 1) the difference between virtual memory and physical memory 2) the dif…
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#73Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#74This might be controversial, but I don't think you get to be a half decent developer without being a reasonable sysadmin. Maybe my experience is unusual, but I've never worked anywhere that the sysadmins knew more than the developers about how best to run their code in production. And when things go wrong with it how best to find the cause of the issue. And I've never thrown code over a wall without having tested it…
Sysadmins must deal with interrupts (requests, crises, things driven by external schedules etc) and then in the rest of their time build systems to manage or reduce the interrupts. Developers are expected to produce work on a predictable schedule. This is disrupted by interrupts and obliterates the schedule for proactive work unless your management is very good at making it a priority.
The "prevention of information services" problem is certainly real though. Perhaps it could be addressed by embedding the sysadmins in the dev teams rather than having a department of their own, but then you have to fight org hierarchy.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#75Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#76Should sysadmins have software development experience (e.g. DevOps)? For what values should 'X have Y experience?' Should we go as far as... "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new proble…
I think about frontend designers (User experience people). They should know a little bit about TCP, SSL, HTTP, networking, monitoring, statistics, and everything related to frontend markup bloat, bandwidth, compression, etc. I've work with many of them, very good about Adobe products and Apple last thing, but clueless about, why their final code is of poor quality. Fortunately, many of them did get their Ego down, wh…
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#77With the rise of devops (docker, puppet, ansible, etc...) , and cloud VMs, how often are sysadmins different from software devs?
That question doesn't make any sense at all. That's exactly the same as saying: with the rise of do it yourself home repair, how often are plumbers different from carpenters?
Reading the article, the sysadmin is described as the person who constructs and maintains the environment the code runs in, including the physical machines, but also things like dependency management (I infer).
Given that just about everything except the physical machine can be handled through devops automation (from experience), and those things don't require "special" skills other than docker/ansible knowledge, why are sysadmins still considered separate from software devs?
On a more opinionated note, I think that using people, and not code to setup the operating environment of their application is pretty inefficient nowadays.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#78Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#79Should sysadmins have software development experience (e.g. DevOps)? For what values should 'X have Y experience?' Should we go as far as... "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new proble…
I suspect I'd have a hard time finding employment doing the kind of work I'd want to do at the kind of salary I'd expect to earn. I'm a decent programmer with broad but rarely deep experience, a better than average sysadmin with ridiculously broad experience, a passable designer (better than half of the "real", but merely average, designers I've worked with over the years, but so far behind the good ones that I'm hesitant to use the same term to describe what I do when I build websites), a passable sales person, a pretty good writer and copy editor, and the list goes on and on, because I've run my own companies for the past 17 years. I've touched everything that a business has to do, and I've somehow muddled through and kept the bills paid and the customers coming back.
But, I'm not a "rock star" at any particular task. I couldn't wow anyone with my algorithms knowledge, though I've always figured out how to solve the problems I needed to solve. That's not a very compelling sales pitch when talking about a $100k+/year job for a company that has a specialist in all of the above-mentioned roles.
So, I think it really depends on what you want out of life. If you want to maximize security and income, focus on a high value skill. Become the best in your market, or as close to it as you can manage. Eschew all distractions from that skill; don't fuck around with weird Linux distros, figuring out how DNSSEC works, building your own mail server, setting up CI, self-hosting all of your own services and web apps, or otherwise becoming a "jack of all trades, master of none". If, on the other hand, all of those distractions sound like the best reason to be in tech (and, that's the way it's always added up for me, even when it's cost me time and money), and you're willing to take on a lot more risk building your own business (whether consulting or building products), I guess being a jack of all trades isn't so bad.
But, and this is a big but: There's only so many hours in the day, and so many productive days in your life (and you also have to take time away from productivity to have a life outside of work/tech). As I get older I realize more and more that I have probably valued my time less than I should and valued my ability to effectively DIY my way to success too highly. I've spent many hours fucking around with stuff that I could have paid someone a few (or a few hundred, or a few thousand) bucks to make the problem go away, and it would have been worth it in a lot of those cases.
Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
#80This might be controversial, but I don't think you get to be a half decent developer without being a reasonable sysadmin. Maybe my experience is unusual, but I've never worked anywhere that the sysadmins knew more than the developers about how best to run their code in production. And when things go wrong with it how best to find the cause of the issue. And I've never thrown code over a wall without having tested it…
I'm sorry you've had such an awful experience with sysadmin colleagues that you've developed such a corrosive attitude towards them. I've worked in lots of good environments, where dev/ops was being effectively practiced, and sysadmins there were the most effective force multipliers imaginable.