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There has been an Eternal September in systems administration. The sysadmin niche has recently been flooded with young people coming from development backgroun

There has been an Eternal September in systems administration. The sysadmin niche has recently been flooded with young people coming from development backgrounds (which, today, the cutting edge is dominated by languages like JS and Go and Python), and they are approaching systems administration from a software development point of view -- attempting to abstract away the systems themselves, set up repeatable and testable environments, that sort of thing. There's a lot of it that's not bad, but as always happens in these situations, they're ignoring the advice and experience of everyone that's kept the lights blinking for several decades now, and those older folks are finding it impossible to keep up with the flood of new people. If anything kills this project one day, it'll be that it's no longer considered "okay" to connect to an individual server over ssh at all; you're supposed to use an IDE-like interface in a web browser, that connects to a service written in Node, that uses an API to download crowd-sourced pre-written web server configurations from a paid service, that then spins up a new VM using an API from another service, that then installs a daemon written in Go, that then installs the new web server configuration, and then all of your data gets migrated over to the new server and the old one gets decommissioned. If you actually ever touch a server or, gods forbid, edit your own Apache or nginx configuration files, you're a fool and an old-timer and you should retire. (Inspired by an actual comment I saw on HN not too long ago.)

deadbunny 10y ago
To be fair I agree with most of that (except the web IDE), abstraction can do a lot for productivity, stability, and scalability but you certainly need the hard won experience when it all goes wrong. My point was more towards the JS side of things. JS just seems like a terrible choice of language for the tasks being performed where there are so many better alternatives, sure it makes writing a desktop app as easy as a web app but it just doesn't seem suited for the purpose. To me it's like writing complex systems in bash, sure it works but it's a pretty terrible choice.
- thaumaturgy 10y ago
  KDE (plasma), Windows, Gnome to a lesser extent, all web browsers, and now the server side all support application development in Javascript. If you're trying to write something once that, with a lot (a lot!) of effort, can run mostly anywhere, Javascript does make sense. But I agree, I wish it had been a different language.
sheer_horror 10y ago
For you to have such a strong opinion on so many topics, you must know the in's and out's of Systems Administration. Would you consider writing tutorials or a blog about best practices, and why we should avoid complex systems built on Node? For what it's worth, this comment is toxic. I am probably the kind of dev that would get lumped in to the group you're calling out, but I edit my own nginx files, I am interested in being close to the metal, and I'm focused on having strong fundamentals. So why not help out instead of being pessimistic? The eternal september thing is everywhere on the web. Everyone loves to talk about how much better it was 'back then'. It's very easy to look back and say that the past was better. You just strap on your rose tinted glasses and sense of superiority, and excuse yourself from any logical, productive discussion. What I would like to see from experienced devs like yourself is some help with merging the best of both worlds. When should I be close to the metal? When should I work high up the stack? If you offer some real help, you could save us days or weeks or months, but if you take the easy route and point the finger then we all lose.
- rch 10y ago
  First, there are plenty of people who can help, and at reasonable rates too. I learned a ton from working with experienced people back in the late 90's. > could save us days or weeks or months I think you mean years or decades...
- thaumaturgy 10y ago
  You're not wrong, but communities are toxic too and after over twenty years of participating in them and discussions and arguments about "the right way" -- which is often only a matter of opinion anyway -- I've mostly opted out now. I just don't feel like putting up with the abuse that predictably comes back. On HN specifically it's pretty challenging. I haven't made a billion dollars, I haven't scaled anything up to 10 million users, I don't have a Github project with thousands of stars, ergo there's no reason to listen to anything I have to say. I have no merits to spend on the meritocracy here. HN also tends to rush to embrace the shiny and the new, so it's not sufficient to say something like, "build new things out of old, simple, battle-tested tools" -- which would be a stupidly obvious thing to say to a room full of greybeard sysadmins -- but you have to be able to justify why you should use older tools, and you have to be able to show that they're sufficiently better than the new thing, and you have to have specific examples, preferably from personal experience. And I don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge to field that argument on much of anything, either. ...maybe a better way to handle this would be to just ask you, what is it that I could say that you would listen to?

deadbunny 10y ago

To be fair I agree with most of that (except the web IDE), abstraction can do a lot for productivity, stability, and scalability but you certainly need the hard won experience when it all goes wrong. My point was more towards the JS side of things. JS just seems like a terrible choice of language for the tasks being performed where there are so many better alternatives, sure it makes writing a desktop app as easy as a web app but it just doesn't seem suited for the purpose. To me it's like writing complex systems in bash, sure it works but it's a pretty terrible choice.

thaumaturgy 10y ago
KDE (plasma), Windows, Gnome to a lesser extent, all web browsers, and now the server side all support application development in Javascript. If you're trying to write something once that, with a lot (a lot!) of effort, can run mostly anywhere, Javascript does make sense. But I agree, I wish it had been a different language.

sheer_horror 10y ago

For you to have such a strong opinion on so many topics, you must know the in's and out's of Systems Administration. Would you consider writing tutorials or a blog about best practices, and why we should avoid complex systems built on Node? For what it's worth, this comment is toxic. I am probably the kind of dev that would get lumped in to the group you're calling out, but I edit my own nginx files, I am interested in being close to the metal, and I'm focused on having strong fundamentals. So why not help out instead of being pessimistic? The eternal september thing is everywhere on the web. Everyone loves to talk about how much better it was 'back then'. It's very easy to look back and say that the past was better. You just strap on your rose tinted glasses and sense of superiority, and excuse yourself from any logical, productive discussion. What I would like to see from experienced devs like yourself is some help with merging the best of both worlds. When should I be close to the metal? When should I work high up the stack? If you offer some real help, you could save us days or weeks or months, but if you take the easy route and point the finger then we all lose.

rch 10y ago
First, there are plenty of people who can help, and at reasonable rates too. I learned a ton from working with experienced people back in the late 90's. > could save us days or weeks or months I think you mean years or decades...
thaumaturgy 10y ago
You're not wrong, but communities are toxic too and after over twenty years of participating in them and discussions and arguments about "the right way" -- which is often only a matter of opinion anyway -- I've mostly opted out now. I just don't feel like putting up with the abuse that predictably comes back. On HN specifically it's pretty challenging. I haven't made a billion dollars, I haven't scaled anything up to 10 million users, I don't have a Github project with thousands of stars, ergo there's no reason to listen to anything I have to say. I have no merits to spend on the meritocracy here. HN also tends to rush to embrace the shiny and the new, so it's not sufficient to say something like, "build new things out of old, simple, battle-tested tools" -- which would be a stupidly obvious thing to say to a room full of greybeard sysadmins -- but you have to be able to justify why you should use older tools, and you have to be able to show that they're sufficiently better than the new thing, and you have to have specific examples, preferably from personal experience. And I don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge to field that argument on much of anything, either. ...maybe a better way to handle this would be to just ask you, what is it that I could say that you would listen to?