I chuckled at the obvious satire. However, I have heard of 'sysadmins' that are complaining with less humour in their voices. The 'pure sysadmin' role is alive and strong. Those being forced out by devops are either not very good or the organization's culture is at odds with what a true sysadmin is expected to do for them. Also, in before, "Lol, Windows admin". I cringed when I saw a registry reference.
For a long time I kept waiting to meet these "job security" sysadmins. The stereotypical 'if things worked better they wouldn't need me' guy. Haven't met him yet. Most admins I've met are automating everything that is reasonable. Many are automating MORE than is reasonable.
The only disturbing trend is how far the helpdesk types get in the hierarchy. My shock at introducing an IT Engineer to ubuntu, only to discover he'd never used a CLI on any system...
I get the same feeling now that I've adopted TDD. I've lost that magic of spending most of my time debugging code. Now I just define the outcome I want, assert that a unwritten function produces that outcome and code the outcome. Sigh /s
You forgot about interacting with third party code that you have no control over. Like when you develop any mobile app.
They really are all crap. Run leaks - playhaven, tapjoy, flurry, etc are all guaranteed to be there. They dont even run static analyzer, which find some of these.
I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "ag…
Devs and admins have different mindsets and attitudes, and that's a good thing.
Devs are more aggressive and forward-looking. Admins are more conservative and status-quo-oriented. You don't want folks with an aggressive mindset to admin your stuff. You don't want folks who worship the status quo to do development.
I chuckled at the obvious satire. However, I have heard of 'sysadmins' that are complaining with less humour in their voices. The 'pure sysadmin' role is alive and strong. Those being forced out by devops are either not very good or the organization's culture is at odds with what a true sysadmin is expected to do for them. Also, in before, "Lol, Windows admin". I cringed when I saw a registry reference.
For a long time I kept waiting to meet these "job security" sysadmins. The stereotypical 'if things worked better they wouldn't need me' guy. Haven't met him yet. Most admins I've met are automating everything that is reasonable. Many are automating MORE than is reasonable. The only disturbing trend is how far the helpdesk types get in the hierarchy. My shock at introducing an IT Engineer to ubuntu, only to discover…
Any sysadmin going the route of 'job security' through obscurity(i.e., no automation or documentation) should be classified as criminally negligent.
My speciality is disaster planning and recovery. I consider myself being hit by a bus a potential disaster. That freak occurrence should not mean the end of a business.
And don't know those helpdesk types who have never touched a CLI. They allow me to bill a fortune when I step in to fix their botched deployments.
I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "ag…
If your admins don't understand the code and crash things - that's an organizational problem that can be corrected. Giving developers admin access isn't the answer. I've seen both sides - where admins didn't undersatnd the environment well enough or the application in it and broke it, and where developers didn't understand the system well enough and pushed out code releases that broke things. Neither situation should…
You think PCI law can tell the difference between a developer and a sysadmin?
I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "ag…
Unless you're a really small org, devs and sysadmins have different roles and need to have distinct privileges to prevent them from stepping on each other. The bigger you get, the more important this is. You have a few things from an internal control POV that you can do to help prevent "bad" things from happening. Examples include: privilege separation, change control, dev/test/prod environments, scripted deployments…
Fun fact: Amazon and Microsoft have done "devops" since before the word was invented. Google and Microsoft do not. As usual, the correct answer is "don't hire idiots" and "do have clear policies, tools, and audits", not "don't allow person X to touch machine Y"
Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand - few do it that way anymore, and those who do are premium brands, built for very specific purposes wherein it doesn't make sense to automate those things. If cars were built all by hand, one by one, by "artists" they would not be affordable or as reliable as they are today. There is consistency, there is scalability, and there is reference in automation. Do you thi…
So, that piece was satire. Unfortunately, satire is frequently used to attack the opposition without actually having to make a cogent argument. > Get over sysadmin as "art" > Building platforms is akin to building cars by hand Uhhh... no. My server is art. Now, I built my own build system, so do I really build servers by hand? No. But I built the build system. And I configured it. And it produces a server that is exa…
"Is my system more performant and secure than the system you built with:
(your favorite package manager) install (all the shit you need)
You forgot about interacting with third party code that you have no control over. Like when you develop any mobile app.
They really are all crap. Run leaks - playhaven, tapjoy, flurry, etc are all guaranteed to be there. They dont even run static analyzer, which find some of these.
I was also talking about vendor libraries, like iOS UIKit and so on.