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This is a short little article that just barely touches on a much deeper, often hidden issue; The state of system administration in business is abysmal. It's n

This is a short little article that just barely touches on a much deeper, often hidden issue; The state of system administration in business is abysmal. It's not the developers fault though, at least not as much as devops types would like you to believe. I think the author has a good point, in that its good to get Devs thinking about real world environments on deploy, but the real world is much more complex than concurrency of servers. All that being said though, very rarely have I as a sysadmin of 10+ years seen problems so easily attributable to devs. Of course I haven't lived in hn/sv startup land either, so take that into account, but failures in systems I have seen have almost always been a failure of management, up to and beyond C level. I could go into detail, but I'll save it for another time. Suffice it to say, what businesses need to be doing is getting better CTOs and CIOs who can bridge the gaping chasm between sysadmins and managment. Devs, you keep being Devs, and let the sysadmins be sysadmins. Cross train and communicate when you can, but don't fool yourselves, it is management that bears the responsibility and burden of you both. Management just doesn't like to admit that to themselves or anyone else, so don't play into this Devs vs sysadmins dialectic too much, lest ye find yourself the scapegoat next go round.

eropple 10y ago
I agree that the dialectic shouldn't be played...but not that it's "cross-training." Rather, it's the same skillsets being applied in slightly different ways. There was a day in which "sysadmin" very often meant "shit-hot Perl slinger." It was before my day, but I know some of the graybeards who can still lay claim to it. The sysadmin who can't write good, maintainable code is going to rapidly see their positions reduced to sinecures in large and slow companies. That may be enough to finish out a career, but I wouldn't bet on it if I was under 50 (and I don't bet on it; I have always, as said elsewhere in this thread, framed myself as "a developer whose output is configured systems" rather than "a sysadmin" for this reason). Similarly, in an age where infrastructure-as-code is becoming the norm, you had better be able to work with it or, as a developer, you are very limited in what you can do without being blessed by somebody else--and the set of environments where that's gonna fly is shrinking, too. This is emphatically not to take any weight off of the shoulders of management, to be sure. But rather that I feel very strongly that what divide existed between these "disciplines" no longer exists, and both developers and traditional sysadmins need to move to catch up.
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  > The sysadmin who can't write good, maintainable code is going to rapidly see their positions reduced to sinecures in large and slow companies. I completely disagree, but respectfully. What I think we are lacking in this discussion is a differentiation between what we mean by sysadmin as a product and as a job description. Systems Administration is a aggregate management of the technical infrastructure. (for $reasons). In super small technical infrastructure, such as webdev startups, there is very little active sysadmining to do if done properly, but as complexities grow, you need multiple people to perform all the various duties needed to maintain a system. In the performance of these duties, there are various descriptions with varying levels of requirements. What I postulate is that traditional businesses in seeing the agility of the dotcom and startup culture have been attempting to cut costs in the technical infrastructure, but for the most part because the managers of the technical infrastructure (the sysadmins) haven't had anyone to advocate on their behalf, this has resulted in poor business performance bottlenecks. I would be curious to hear what other have to say, but in the "shit-hot Perl slinger." days, usually the senior sysadmin was the slinger, and he reported directly to the CFO and CEO, if not ownership. What I argue is that systems have gained in complexity from a computing infrastructure standpoint such that this old structure no longer worked well, hence the creation of the CTO/CIO class(very similar). The problem is, they aren't doing a good job in my opinion. Therefore, in this current business climate, my argument is that the main problem is we already have good code slinging sysadmins on hand (or can train them), but what businesses need/the industry is lacking, is business/political game aware senior sysadmins to make up for that failing of the C's. Hence I disagree the days of non-code slinging sysadmins are going anywhere. Indeed, some of the best senior sysadmins I know live in meetings, but if they are performing well in fulfilling that role, and not slinging code, but instead making big picture, high-level overview decisions and then monitoring progress, I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Now, if we got CIO/CTOs back on the right track, the political/business game demand could fall and those sysadmins could get back into hard work, (which just happens to sometimes involve code-slinging to solve problems.) Devs are an entirely seperate entity, but still part of the process, in anything other than a pure web startup type businesses with little to no real infrastructure (eg, workfrom home contractors). Of course I want to qualify this in that this is ancedotal and I admit I haven't seen every environment, but I have seen many environments (as a contractor, seeing more insides than the guy going for retirement), from fortune 500s to 2 man lawyer shops. Any business that can see this issue coming and address it head on will be far ahead of the game. Those that don't, will one day have very rude wakeup calls as the complexity exponentially increases and they don't have the structures in place the handle the demand, mostly due to lack of foresight/vision.

eropple 10y ago

I agree that the dialectic shouldn't be played...but not that it's "cross-training." Rather, it's the same skillsets being applied in slightly different ways. There was a day in which "sysadmin" very often meant "shit-hot Perl slinger." It was before my day, but I know some of the graybeards who can still lay claim to it. The sysadmin who can't write good, maintainable code is going to rapidly see their positions reduced to sinecures in large and slow companies. That may be enough to finish out a career, but I wouldn't bet on it if I was under 50 (and I don't bet on it; I have always, as said elsewhere in this thread, framed myself as "a developer whose output is configured systems" rather than "a sysadmin" for this reason). Similarly, in an age where infrastructure-as-code is becoming the norm, you had better be able to work with it or, as a developer, you are very limited in what you can do without being blessed by somebody else--and the set of environments where that's gonna fly is shrinking, too. This is emphatically not to take any weight off of the shoulders of management, to be sure. But rather that I feel very strongly that what divide existed between these "disciplines" no longer exists, and both developers and traditional sysadmins need to move to catch up.

arca_vorago 10y ago
> The sysadmin who can't write good, maintainable code is going to rapidly see their positions reduced to sinecures in large and slow companies. I completely disagree, but respectfully. What I think we are lacking in this discussion is a differentiation between what we mean by sysadmin as a product and as a job description. Systems Administration is a aggregate management of the technical infrastructure. (for $reasons). In super small technical infrastructure, such as webdev startups, there is very little active sysadmining to do if done properly, but as complexities grow, you need multiple people to perform all the various duties needed to maintain a system. In the performance of these duties, there are various descriptions with varying levels of requirements. What I postulate is that traditional businesses in seeing the agility of the dotcom and startup culture have been attempting to cut costs in the technical infrastructure, but for the most part because the managers of the technical infrastructure (the sysadmins) haven't had anyone to advocate on their behalf, this has resulted in poor business performance bottlenecks. I would be curious to hear what other have to say, but in the "shit-hot Perl slinger." days, usually the senior sysadmin was the slinger, and he reported directly to the CFO and CEO, if not ownership. What I argue is that systems have gained in complexity from a computing infrastructure standpoint such that this old structure no longer worked well, hence the creation of the CTO/CIO class(very similar). The problem is, they aren't doing a good job in my opinion. Therefore, in this current business climate, my argument is that the main problem is we already have good code slinging sysadmins on hand (or can train them), but what businesses need/the industry is lacking, is business/political game aware senior sysadmins to make up for that failing of the C's. Hence I disagree the days of non-code slinging sysadmins are going anywhere. Indeed, some of the best senior sysadmins I know live in meetings, but if they are performing well in fulfilling that role, and not slinging code, but instead making big picture, high-level overview decisions and then monitoring progress, I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Now, if we got CIO/CTOs back on the right track, the political/business game demand could fall and those sysadmins could get back into hard work, (which just happens to sometimes involve code-slinging to solve problems.) Devs are an entirely seperate entity, but still part of the process, in anything other than a pure web startup type businesses with little to no real infrastructure (eg, workfrom home contractors). Of course I want to qualify this in that this is ancedotal and I admit I haven't seen every environment, but I have seen many environments (as a contractor, seeing more insides than the guy going for retirement), from fortune 500s to 2 man lawyer shops. Any business that can see this issue coming and address it head on will be far ahead of the game. Those that don't, will one day have very rude wakeup calls as the complexity exponentially increases and they don't have the structures in place the handle the demand, mostly due to lack of foresight/vision.