The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)

One and two-man startups provide ample evidence that working knowledge of the whole platform is not beyond human cognitive scope, even if getting this to be accepted at large requires some extra cultural encouragement and support, and some professional management of individual "skewing".

Once more, it's not that everyone has to be a hardcore expert in everything all at once. You don't want them to be.

You just want your main people to know each platform component well enough to be able to make a reasoned decision about the trade-offs involved in using one or the other for a specific task, and then to be able to own that decision as a group.

If they can't or won't do that, the platform decisions become political instead of technical. I've seen this over and over again, where massive technical problems are routed around because the Java developers have been told they can't touch Ruby, or the C# developers have been told they can't touch SQL, and the real problem never gets fixed, because we only recognize naive, scared "specialists" who insist that they can't learn Python because they're just a PHP developer, so they can't look at that piece of Python that's holding up the thing, instead of rounded, capable "generalists" who can be trusted to call in help when they're getting in over their heads, and may take an occasional "inspection" or two to make sure they're aligned with best practices.

General contractors are not electricians, but they can do a lot of routine work that involves electrical fixtures, sockets, and outlets. You call the electrician for the face-melting stuff.

General practitioner MDs are not dermatologists, but they can do a lot of work that involves routine skin disorders. They'll prescribe creams for fungal infections, rashes, acne, etc. They'll let you know you need to call in a dermatologist for the "skin-melting" stuff.

In software, we don't say "call the DBA for the database-melting stuff." We say "the DBA will write all of the SQL for you." It just doesn't seem to comport to me.

Unless one can compile it oneself, how can one trust that a particular version of a binary release correspond to a particular version of a source release?

If the process is reproduced by another trusted-enough source and is identical to the official release, then I'd say one can go ahead and trust the binary release of either one.

Sadly, I don't think this is generally done, though perhaps ones own spot-checking of the official release is enough.

That's supposed to be the basis of modern science, too, though, of course, it's not generally done there, either.

It's just that they don't want to. They think it's boring, or perhaps even beneath them. It's a bit like tax preparation.

I don't think that's really changed all that much, even today, even if it's now programming against the AWS API, judging by the number of job postings for such a role.

Also, like with tax preparation, using a good expert instead of doing it oneself could save on a lot of money and/or future headaches, but it can come with "grumpy" old-fashioned-seeming nagging about procedures akin to annotating and saving receipts. Whether it's worth it depends on situation and, far more importantly temperament.

However, I still disagree with your premise that it's merely our attitude at large somehow holding people back. Startup founders don't refute my suggestion that there's a cognitive limitation involved, since they're relatively rare and may well have greater capacity to be the generalists that you're proposing. I'm also not convinced that, even among founders, they're as broad generalists as you're suggesting.

You go on to give non-computer examples of generalists and specialists, yet you don't address how it is that specialists are (admittedly only imoplicitly) ok there but not in computer tech.

To reiterate my point about cognitive capacity, if true specialists are desirable, then I allege asking them to be more of a generalist makes them a less competent specialist and therefore less valuable on the market. That's an alternate explanation for extremity of specialization than preconceived notions.

Now, personally, I share your desire for greater breadth of knowledge among all technical professionals, if for no other reason than they might have a greater appreciation for my own specialization. I just don't think it's realistic.

Ultimately you could have a git clone for every machine and only ever run it against localhost.