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If you come to the conclusion that the opportunity cost is too high for your team/company, fine...I can believe it....as long as you're also weighing the benefi
by latch 11y ago
If you come to the conclusion that the opportunity cost is too high for your team/company, fine...I can believe it....as long as you're also weighing the benefit of learning. All learning has an opportunity cost.
I do believe that someone who can setup and configure nginx to do load balancing, caching, rate limiting and build middlewares in LUA is potentially going to be a more productive full stack developer than someone who can't. As a programmer, having managed postgresql, has made me a more effective programmer. I have a good understanding of how it vacuum and collects statistics, the relationship between connections and sorts and work_mem, so I'm better equipped at writing queries and troubleshooting issues.
The gain to me personally and to my employer (and future employers) is not trivial.
- gedrap 11y agoGreat point and I totally agree with you. Treating everything like a black box that just shove money into isn't going to take you far either :)
- rashkov 11y agoThis reminds me of recent discussions about how countries that outsource their manufacturing quickly lose knowledge of manufacturing technology and fall behind in innovation and self-reliance. I don't think we are there yet, but it is conceivable that in the future system administration could become a lost art to many. Something to consider as more of our infrastructure needs are met by the cloud. I'm sure I'm overstating this, but I figured I'd share anyway
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pjlegato 11y agoIt's true that you gain some technical knowledge by learning all that. The question is whether that is worth the opportunity cost of not learning other things or doing something else during that time. Every minute you spend studying nginx config files or adjusting work_mem is a minute you are not spending working on your actual product or app. To some extent it is indeed beneficial to know how all that stuff works. But at some point your time is better spent working on things that differentiate your specific company from others, rather than spending it on twiddling the same set of knobs that everyone else has.