The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

Whether it's programming or system administration, you're always going to have new people getting excited about the sudden power they've learned. Being able to make computers do things opens up this whole new world, and when people find themselves in that world they may end up overestimating their skills and underestimating how much they need to grow. What they fail at understanding they make up with in enthusiasm, and with experience they become more knowledgable about what they don't know.

If we waited until they were "qualified" for jobs they would never get the experience to become qualified. At the same time there is more than enough room in the current job market to support people of lower skillsets, and for some companies that's considered an investment (junior people tend to turn to senior people over time).

This is where it becomes a company culture issue. If a company is smart they'll have a few senior people making sure things are held to the right standard, and a few junior people who can get things done but need some guidance and direction. However, lots of companies (especially the smaller ones who may be more constrained by budget) go for the cheaper route and would rather hire someone junior as their main support. The problem isn't that the sysadmins aren't qualified sysadmins, it's that they're junior system admins who have been hired for the wrong job. Companies that fail to value experience tend to suffer as a result.

Are you really trying to say that the instructions for installing Docker should be considered in-scope for a guide to install Discourse on a cloud server?

They've included a short snippet that will get you a Docker, in the way recommended by Docker, for whatever your base system is. Many production systems do not move at the pace of Docker development, so it's not practical to run Docker from your distribution's package archive. Some distros will not have distributed packaged Docker releases at all.

What's wrong with these instructions? If you are really "dealing with this" right now, it is worth noting that something like 20 or more supported platforms have specific Docker installation instructions from the Docker website.

https://docs.docker.com/installation/#installation

From a quick sample of those instructions, only the Ubuntu instruction page uses the wget|sh method, and it's using an SSL connection to Docker's own website to add an apt source with signatures in the supported way. This way should work on any Debian-based or Yum-based distro, and writing the instructions like this must likely save Discourse from getting a lot of "How do I docker" issues and e-mails from their clueless users.

So, would you prefer that part just says "installing Docker is out of scope" or should the Discourse developers go through every distro and cloud system and document the specific instructions for that? To do that would completely defeat the purpose of even using Docker at all.

What does the language have to do with the program?

Hadoop is what it is because it's a complex problem with a fittingly complex solution. Simply re-writing it in your pet language won't somehow make it "better".