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Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

blog.professorbeekums.com

131–140 of 424 posts

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#131

The underpinning logic seems false. To extend the analogy of the house on a slope, if you don't tell the developer you need a house designed to be built on a slope, that is a problem with the spec provided to the developer. Although it can at times be more efficient for a dev to have sysadmin experience, making blanket statements requiring all developers to come with such a background is just sensationalism.

Wholeheartedly agree.

I think the lesson the author is really trying to convey is the importance of learning about distributed computing [1] concepts and not necessarily system administration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#132
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, it's not as though if you're going to drop one of the two groups of people it's going to be them going 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.

> awful experience with sysadmin colleagues that you've developed such a corrosive attitude This is going to be a sensitive topic, but can we talk about ""BOFH"" culture somewhere on this thread? (Maybe I'm old and it's now dead, but I think some of it persists) I kind of understand it as a product of working in an environment where everything is urgent and nothing is appreciated, but when sysadmins come to resent th…

> where everything is urgent and nothing is appreciated

in such an environment i wouldn't expect any other result. fix the environment, not the rational human response to it.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#133
Hi, I'm a Sysadmin, and I've been a grumpy one through a larger part of my 15 years experience. My main issue was that Developers were acting like Users: they don't care about what you have to deal with, they want things to 'just work'. In return, I've treated them like children, in some instances yelled at them when they did dumb stuff. I've tried to educate them when possible, and was angry when the education didn't stick. At the time i was the 'King of the Hill' type of sysadmin - natural leader of a very small and tight team, kind of irreplacable, and with enough years in the company behind me to consider myself as a demi-god.

When I switched companies, I came across better developers. Some had decent sysadmin skills, but the main difference was that they actually took interest in how things worked past the 'git push', and when I asked / required them to make some changes that would make my life easier, they listened, discussed and adopted when appropriate. With those same guys, I took interest in what they were doing, what their actual job was and came up with ideas that would make things easyier and run smoothly on both ends. After a while I figured out that they weren't actually better developers - they were better people. (Also, I figured out that being grumpy was not the best approach and that patience, kindness and gratitude could get people to do more than snark, humiliation and flame-throwers.)

I guess my point is: you don't really NEED to have sysadmin skills to be a decent developer; what you really need is to care about what sysadmins do - be curious, talk with them and trust them when they say that your brilliant idea won't work in production.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#134
What he's talking about is systems architecture not sysadmin experiece.

Of course developers have to write code for a logical model of a machine that isn't necessarily the same as the laptop they're working on. But I don't think anyone would ever dispute that.

Storing pictures on a local disk when the software is supposed to run on a cluster has absolutely nothing to do with sysadmin experience.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#135
Nope. SD should not be using DB. They should use API to make REST | Microservices, ex FireBase. SD should not be using servers. They should go serverless, deploy static HTML to CDN>

etc. If you are still using docker, puppet or worried about scale/security... you are living in the past. (one ex: https://github.com/struts3/what-demos )

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#136
post #72
post #37

I'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…

The list of things to learn is endless . The only way we can get anything done on a daily basis is to gloss over the magic being done somewhere else in the system.

> The list of things to learn is endless.

yes, however there are items that are more important (ACLs, AD, Security, OID ... etc) that are a little more important than the new shiny JS framework.

I'd rather burn brain cells learning Haskell than trying to understand why so much effort is being spent on JS.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#137
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with the Heinlein sentiment. Practically everyone doing one will benefit from a stint as the other. I've had a foot in both graves my entire career and it's an amazingly useful skill group. How you get there is up to you. My own path was freakishly meandering. Don't be afraid to get out of your depth, but try to have a mentor around to stop you drowning. And remember that DevOps is a mindset, not a job. If someon…

> How you get there is up to you. My own path was freakishly meandering. 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 gris…

To complement Heinlein:

Therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don't. No one does. You shouldn't be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren't real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I'm following, and I'm not walking in anyone else's footsteps. I'm making it up as I go. - Charlie Hoehn

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#138
post #113

I'm a front-end developer with very little knowledge of sysadmin stuff, but I can't agree more, the best developers I've ever seen had massive sysadmin experience. Can you point some good resources about sysadmin I could use to improve my knowledge on the subject? Note I'm a noob when it comes to all this server-side magic.

When I was getting into ops 10 years ago the book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" by Thomas Limoncelli was a great overview (very high level and not specific) that we all read.

The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim is kind of a more modern uptake on it, but both can be read easily by people outside of the field and I doubt the first one will ever not be relevant.

Both are more about establishing proper ops methodologies. If you're looking for something more low level, like a Programmers guide to sysadmin I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#139
Yes, yes. We get it, we should know all things, keep up with all the latest rends, work 80+ hours every week, and do our company's IT support on the side for free while we code their software. Or companies could compensate us for our time and hire more god damn people if they need it. You know, just saying.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not the same at all. Let me rephrase the question. 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 "speci…

Thinking like this is what leads to tens of thousands of Mongo databases being exposed online.

Anyone can follow a "how to install X" guide and install a few packages and get a working config to get going and then automate it with their tool of choice but that doesn't come anywhere close to a production ready system.

When your job focus is shipping product that's all you care about, get it out the door as fast as possible so why learn anything more than the bare minimum?

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