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Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

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Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#91

Post by ptaipale »

afarrell wrote: post #88
pjmorris wrote: post #12

Should sysadmins have software development experience (e.g. DevOps)? For what values should 'X have Y experience?' Should we go as far as... "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new proble…

I strenuously disagree with some of these. > Plan an invasion This is actually a massive undertaking. An undergraduate at MIT taking a semester-long course on this will barely scratch the surface of it. Furthermore, you're never going to suddenly and unexpectedly need to know this. Any situation where you plan an invasion is going to be preceded by spending a long time getting into the position where people trust you…

> > die gallantly

> You're only ever going to be in this situation once, and probably not even that. Why does it matter how gallant your heart attack is?

I think doesn't exactly refer to the act of dying, but is more along the lines of "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." So don't exactly want to die; rather, you want to avoid it, but should it happen, you just want to make it very expensive.

But of course, it could also have nothing to do with war; it could be about how you face death, and how much of a burden you leave to your loved ones. (E.g. don't commit suicide leaving a note that tries to shift the blame to your family, or whatever).

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#93

Post by yomly »

afarrell wrote: post #88
pjmorris wrote: post #12

Should sysadmins have software development experience (e.g. DevOps)? For what values should 'X have Y experience?' Should we go as far as... "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new proble…

I strenuously disagree with some of these. > Plan an invasion This is actually a massive undertaking. An undergraduate at MIT taking a semester-long course on this will barely scratch the surface of it. Furthermore, you're never going to suddenly and unexpectedly need to know this. Any situation where you plan an invasion is going to be preceded by spending a long time getting into the position where people trust you…

>These skills make a bit more sense in a world where most of us need to march off to war. Happily, we don't live in that world.

Depends how old you are.. some historians are keen to point out that the global climate is very similar to the conditions just before WW1. Will you be of conscription age if WW3 does break out in the next decade?

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#94

Post by mattmanser »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #84
bpchaps wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness to the folk who can't install Visual Studio - it's a genuine pain in the butt. Last time I tried, half of the download links were absolutely non-functional. Their documentation didn't help much, either, since they pointed to the non-functioning links. I got a lot of shit for that one, but felt completely vindicated when it happened to someone else a year later.

> In fairness to the folk who can't install Visual Studio - it's a genuine pain in the butt. It takes a while but I've never found it to be a pain in the butt and I've used it, off and on, since version 6 in the late 90s. If the install errors out it gives you an error message, you google for it, figure out what the problem is (most common messages are easy to find solutions for), fix the problem, reinstall, done.

Then you were lucky.

I remember on the first day of a new job being given a folder containing all the MSDN subscription disks in the mid-2000s and being told to install visual studio.

I'd only ever used notepad as an editor before.

This is a massive stack of DVDs with multiple disks, but worse there are a bunch of cds listing different versions of a thing called "visual studio".

After 15 minutes of struggling and surreptitious googling because I didn't want to look stupid on my new job, a colleague walked by, went "oh", picked out the right disk and said "that's the one you need". And I had to do the same for multiple new starters.

Even today when you have to install something from MSDN, you search for "Office" and get a bunch of irrelevant language packs listed at the top which is definitely not what you want, then also have to know what x86 and x64 means, something a novice will not know, and know what "SP" means and that "SP2" is better than "SP1".

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#95

Post by imjustsaying »

Maybe it's only because I've only ever worked with myself, but it's hard to imagine a software developer who isn't also a sysadmin by necessity. How do you debug things otherwise?

In what city or company is the barrier to entry for software developers so low?

I just can't imagine paying above median income for a software developer who can't install, for an example given in this thread, Visual Studio.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#96

Post by _nalply »

kqr2 wrote: post #2

Somewhat related, I feel that mechanical engineers who design cars should have some experience servicing vehicles. Sometimes engineers will not leave enough space, use weird fasteners, etc. that make a simple job much more complex.

In a similar vein: Some houses are just so unpractical to live in, that architects should be punished by ordering them to do household chores, especially cleaning!

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#97

Post by vacri »

BurningFrog wrote: post #54
nokya wrote: 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…

I'm a quite good programmer who is a pretty terrible sys admin. Of your 11 points, I understand 1-10 quite well, but I'm not great at 11. I think the skill sets are quite different, despite the fact that a lot of people have both. I was never really that "into computers", but I have a burning passion for building large software systems fast and well. Metaphor: I love to travel to exotic locations across the planet. T…

I don't think the OP is talking about low-level OS stuff like perhaps a flaky hard drive, but about installing the things that turn a vanilla machine into your working environment, plus being able to sort out things when something goes wrong with that environment. If you're in IDE Foo all day every day, you should know your tool enough to fix it when it goes wrong.

I've not had them myself, but I have talked to other sysadmins who've had devs that couldn't install their own IDE. These people weren't seniors, admittedly, but they were still drawing pay...

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#98

Post by kabdib »

I used to work on a product where the three major teams were Client, Server and Ops. Tens of millions of customers used our stuff.

Client and Server folks were on separate floors of the same building. We didn't interact much at all, except by trading bugs back and forth. The management chains met at a VP. Three or four times a year we tried to coordinate a release, and it always took at least a month. Getting a feature out the door might take a year, with all the paperwork and pipelining of release schedules.

Ops was in another building. The only things that both Client and Server teams were sure of was (a) they did a bunch of customization of our stuff so that it would work, and (b) they hated us.

Support was in another state. We were not allowed to talk to customers. Maybe once a year Support would fly in to talk to the teams about pain points. I think we did an okay job addressing these, but it took a long time, and customers suffered a lot.

I won't talk about the disaster that ensued when Scrum was thrust upon us, or the splinter projects that spun off to try to fix things (but wound up being lots worse).

You have to be close to the customer or you won't know if you're succeeding, or even on the same page. You have to know what your software is doing in production or you're just sitting in an ivory tower pontificating about angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin nonsense. You have to spend time in the trenches measuring and fixing stuff or you're hatching an unmanageable disaster. The good news is that most of this is actually kind of fun. The bad news is that, when managed badly, this can turn into a horrible and soulless grind of pager duty and making legacy code even more legacy to fix wee-hours downtime.

I still get a rush when I get feedback from a real, live customer, and I think that isolating your teams from customers is one of the worst things you can do to a team and to a product. Getting teams to work on ops and support aren't bad ways to improve this.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#99

Post by pjc50 »

afarrell wrote: post #88
pjmorris wrote: post #12

Should sysadmins have software development experience (e.g. DevOps)? For what values should 'X have Y experience?' Should we go as far as... "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new proble…

I strenuously disagree with some of these. > Plan an invasion This is actually a massive undertaking. An undergraduate at MIT taking a semester-long course on this will barely scratch the surface of it. Furthermore, you're never going to suddenly and unexpectedly need to know this. Any situation where you plan an invasion is going to be preceded by spending a long time getting into the position where people trust you…

It's literature, and SF, so it would be a mistake to take the quotation too literally. But since we're here; the thing to remember about Heinlein is that he was a romantic and a futurist at the same time. Hence his militarism wasn't so much about the enemy as about providing an opportunity for romantic heroism. Similarly with the other items in the list. It's not grounded in practical necessity but in a "renaissance man" / hero of a novel approach to being able to not just handle situations but show off in them.

Re: Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience

#100

Post by kriro »

Aloha wrote: post #39
nokya wrote: 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…

I've worked with all kinds - from windows devs who can't figure out how to install visual studio - to people who understand Windows, Linux, and macOS - as well as basic system administration for each platform. The people who are most successful at rapidly developing good high quality software are more in the later group. Would you trust a RF engineer who couldn't troubleshoot his own radio designs? why would you trou…

I feel the same. Someone who isn't willing to investigate issues with their own work machine or spending some time configuring it is more likely than not to be less of a continuous learner (imo).

Looking at it short term a well paid developer troubleshooting all issues on their work laptop could be seen as a waste of resources but for me software development is a beautiful craft. I also wouldn't trust a carpenter who can't obsess over wood or tools. If I overhear two developers comparing notes on their tmux setup somewhere I mentally upgrade them into the interesting category right away.

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