Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

I was a sysadmin with various ISPs in various countries for 15 years before I "turned to the dark side". I'd been using Ruby for a few years with Puppet and Chef, and after dealing with one too many "flaky coders", I picked it up.

I have to say, coding is far more enjoyable, though both come in handy in my day-to-day life.

It sounds like you've dealt with a few "BOFH" sysadmins. Don't worry, we're not all like that, and those that have been on both sides of the team will probably see your way.

Tell your boss I'm available (remotely), by the way ;)

Which means the ones with actual, marketable skills aren't working for the government.

Spending months waiting for a sysadmin to perform a task you know takes about 3 minutes is great fun.

D: I have noticed that task Frobnicate has not been running in Production for a month, then checked and it is not even added to scheduler!

SA: There is no mention of Frobnicate in the pipeline for scheduled tasks.

D: What pipeline? FancyPancyScheduler is bundled with application and tasks are defined in DB, I have done it in Staging and everything worked, Frobnicate is all the fuss in the team, you must have heard about it, why don't you check for changes in Staging?

SA: We have well defined pipeline to manage scheduled tasks, currently the executing agent is Cron, not FancyPancyScheduler.

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Developers and Admins have more or less the same goals (stable, maintainable and extensible), but on different pieces of the system (code vs infrastructure). In my short career I have seen problems arise where one party makes plans and changes according to current or even past (it worked like this earlier) state of the other party. This applies to both developers and admins.

So I sort of agree with your sentiment, that developers need understanding of system administration. Though, depending on team size, I believe it is entirely sufficient to have someone in Developement who understands system administration and actual infrastructure, and someone in Operations who understands developement and actual stack. This is where I hope DevOps will end up at: arbitration between Developement and Operations to ensure smooth sailing forwards. Because the debate "I will do it in code" versus "this must be done on the edge" (e.g. static assets in a website. Served by application or web frontend?) will never be resolved.

Edit: formatting