4 ms·

Hi, I'm a Sysadmin, and I've been a grumpy one through a larger part of my 15 years experience. My main issue was that Developers were acting like Users: they d

by eviln1 10y ago

Hi, I'm a Sysadmin, and I've been a grumpy one through a larger part of my 15 years experience. My main issue was that Developers were acting like Users: they don't care about what you have to deal with, they want things to 'just work'. In return, I've treated them like children, in some instances yelled at them when they did dumb stuff. I've tried to educate them when possible, and was angry when the education didn't stick. At the time i was the 'King of the Hill' type of sysadmin - natural leader of a very small and tight team, kind of irreplacable, and with enough years in the company behind me to consider myself as a demi-god. When I switched companies, I came across better developers. Some had decent sysadmin skills, but the main difference was that they actually took interest in how things worked past the 'git push', and when I asked / required them to make some changes that would make my life easier, they listened, discussed and adopted when appropriate. With those same guys, I took interest in what they were doing, what their actual job was and came up with ideas that would make things easyier and run smoothly on both ends. After a while I figured out that they weren't actually better developers - they were better people. (Also, I figured out that being grumpy was not the best approach and that patience, kindness and gratitude could get people to do more than snark, humiliation and flame-throwers.) I guess my point is: you don't really NEED to have sysadmin skills to be a decent developer; what you really need is to care about what sysadmins do - be curious, talk with them and trust them when they say that your brilliant idea won't work in production.

joadha 10y ago
I've worked as both a dev and sys admin, and I think this is the most reasonable response so far.
davidgerard 10y ago
As a sysadmin, I love the devs who think "devops" and I make a point of saying nice things about them to the CTO.
pyrale 10y ago
This, so much this. You don't need to be the sheep with 5 legs every manager wants, what you need is to be accessible to collaborate with people on problems. That's an individual skill as well as a systemic one, though.
morbidhawk 10y ago
I think there are definitely developers out there that give little to no respect to systems administrators. I've seen this ignorance even in college professors. In my first programming class in college I took a CS class that had both CS and IT students in it since it was required for both kinds of students. The (CS) professor kept trying to convince students how much better CS was and gave some good arguments (ie: salary) but the most arrogant thing he said is that IT is a subset of CS and that by doing a CS degree you would understand everything it takes to be in IT. He also mentioned how in IT you would be constantly fixing other people's computer problems but as a software engineer you wouldn't need IT's help since you can fix it yourself. The funny part is part-way through my degree I realized that college didn't even offer a real CS degree it was called "CIT with Computer Science Emphasis" which none of my advisers nor professors mentioned would cause issues getting jobs outside of Utah, the best thing I did was leave that school and finish my CS degree elsewhere which caused me to lose a lot of unnecessary credits and almost felt like I was starting over. I feel like I got scammed but that's beside the point I am yet to work for a company where a software engineer gets to manage his own computer without following IT guidelines like my CS prof had described.
joekrill 10y ago
I think it's more than that -- it likely stems from how the IT department is run at a particular company, too. I've dealt with many sysadmins that offer absolutely no transparency into their processes, and in many cases actively obfuscate it. So any attempt to take an interest seems to be interpreted as some sort of threat to their position. Either way, this is a two-way street. And often times the culture of one group or the other gets in the way. Which is really unfortunate.
wccrawford 10y ago
As a developer with some very basic sysadmin knowledge, I'd say you have to have enough sysadmin skill to set up and administer your own system, but not enough to keep it running and deal with attacks and security in the OS. (Obviously, attacks and security in the software you're writing are still your responsibility.) I say this because if I had to wait for a sysadmin every time I wanted to see if something worked, I'd spend a lot of time doing nothing. And it's likely that I couldn't even solve a lot of problems. So I think you not only have to know what they do, but some of how to do it.
thijsvandien 10y ago
Mostly this. Having been an admin myself, gradually moving more and more towards development, I understand what things in software are annoying for an admin to have to deal with. Most developers simply don't care. Grant full permissions or don't expect anything to work. Any objections and you're a troublemaker. A better attitude would have gone a long way, but firsthand experience works best. In addition, it helps me greatly when there is no (decent) admin around. I know whether to suspect the software or the system it's running on, how to keep things running on a less than ideally configured/maintained system without completely compromising security, can help users when the problem they're having is not a problem with the software, but a problem to them anyway – they love the extra mile – et cetera. It must be said that some admins are just as shortsighted. Knowing what kind of measures actually work for stability, security, and so on, I've come to strongly dislike those who only complicate the situation to no benefit, as well as those who point their finger at the software when it really is their system that's causing problems.
rcymerys 10y ago
I couldn't agree more. I didn't realize the importance of all the "admin stuff", before the our newly hired sysadmin came to me and asked if I could help him figure out how to deploy the project I was working on. This ended up being a looong chat about monitoring, redundancy, architecture, security... you name it. What I've always thought of as installing and configuring software turned out to also touch designing the software so that it works reliably and is easy to maintain. I don't think I'll ever have plenty of sysadmin skills, but knowing even the general idea of what's important to sysadmins helps a lot. Also, being able to become another interruption in their day and consult ideas is priceless. :)

by eviln1 10y ago

joadha 10y ago

I've worked as both a dev and sys admin, and I think this is the most reasonable response so far.

davidgerard 10y ago

As a sysadmin, I love the devs who think "devops" and I make a point of saying nice things about them to the CTO.

pyrale 10y ago

This, so much this. You don't need to be the sheep with 5 legs every manager wants, what you need is to be accessible to collaborate with people on problems. That's an individual skill as well as a systemic one, though.

morbidhawk 10y ago

I think there are definitely developers out there that give little to no respect to systems administrators. I've seen this ignorance even in college professors. In my first programming class in college I took a CS class that had both CS and IT students in it since it was required for both kinds of students. The (CS) professor kept trying to convince students how much better CS was and gave some good arguments (ie: salary) but the most arrogant thing he said is that IT is a subset of CS and that by doing a CS degree you would understand everything it takes to be in IT. He also mentioned how in IT you would be constantly fixing other people's computer problems but as a software engineer you wouldn't need IT's help since you can fix it yourself. The funny part is part-way through my degree I realized that college didn't even offer a real CS degree it was called "CIT with Computer Science Emphasis" which none of my advisers nor professors mentioned would cause issues getting jobs outside of Utah, the best thing I did was leave that school and finish my CS degree elsewhere which caused me to lose a lot of unnecessary credits and almost felt like I was starting over. I feel like I got scammed but that's beside the point I am yet to work for a company where a software engineer gets to manage his own computer without following IT guidelines like my CS prof had described.

joekrill 10y ago

I think it's more than that -- it likely stems from how the IT department is run at a particular company, too. I've dealt with many sysadmins that offer absolutely no transparency into their processes, and in many cases actively obfuscate it. So any attempt to take an interest seems to be interpreted as some sort of threat to their position. Either way, this is a two-way street. And often times the culture of one group or the other gets in the way. Which is really unfortunate.

wccrawford 10y ago

As a developer with some very basic sysadmin knowledge, I'd say you have to have enough sysadmin skill to set up and administer your own system, but not enough to keep it running and deal with attacks and security in the OS. (Obviously, attacks and security in the software you're writing are still your responsibility.) I say this because if I had to wait for a sysadmin every time I wanted to see if something worked, I'd spend a lot of time doing nothing. And it's likely that I couldn't even solve a lot of problems. So I think you not only have to know what they do, but some of how to do it.

thijsvandien 10y ago

Mostly this. Having been an admin myself, gradually moving more and more towards development, I understand what things in software are annoying for an admin to have to deal with. Most developers simply don't care. Grant full permissions or don't expect anything to work. Any objections and you're a troublemaker. A better attitude would have gone a long way, but firsthand experience works best. In addition, it helps me greatly when there is no (decent) admin around. I know whether to suspect the software or the system it's running on, how to keep things running on a less than ideally configured/maintained system without completely compromising security, can help users when the problem they're having is not a problem with the software, but a problem to them anyway – they love the extra mile – et cetera. It must be said that some admins are just as shortsighted. Knowing what kind of measures actually work for stability, security, and so on, I've come to strongly dislike those who only complicate the situation to no benefit, as well as those who point their finger at the software when it really is their system that's causing problems.

rcymerys 10y ago

I couldn't agree more. I didn't realize the importance of all the "admin stuff", before the our newly hired sysadmin came to me and asked if I could help him figure out how to deploy the project I was working on. This ended up being a looong chat about monitoring, redundancy, architecture, security... you name it. What I've always thought of as installing and configuring software turned out to also touch designing the software so that it works reliably and is easy to maintain. I don't think I'll ever have plenty of sysadmin skills, but knowing even the general idea of what's important to sysadmins helps a lot. Also, being able to become another interruption in their day and consult ideas is priceless. :)