> or at least, they trust their knowledge of infrastructure solutions better than their coding abilities Or we trust our knowledge of such solutions more than

> or at least, they trust their knowledge of infrastructure solutions better than their coding abilities Or we trust our knowledge of such solutions more than even your (anyone's) coding abilities :) I realize, of course, that you're using "trust" as a metaphor for expertise, as well as that we all have a tendency to be biased in favor of solutions that favor that expertise/familiarity. The trouble is, programmers outnumber ops people by a vast, vast margin, especially here on HN. > often, an ops person can take your developed software as a black box, and solve its scaling problems without touching the box. Not often enough, not any more. It seems that this skillset has been sufficiently devalued in the industry that, however rare it was originally, it hasn't spread, which means there may well be a significant plurality of coders out there who have never worked with such an ops person. > And this is often the optimal way to solve these problems: you probably can't write a caching layer for your web app, inside your web-app's process, that will work half as well as Memcached This goes back to my original, partly facetious, comment about trusting anyone's coding. My real point is that I don't need any kind of faith in something like memcache, since I've seen it work many times before, whereas someone's coding ability (even my own) does require a leap of faith, since it's totally unknown how effective the effort will be or on what time scale. > And, since these scaling problems can be solved without ever touching your code, it's especially silly to try to anticipate scaling problems you might have and solve them in your code That's a message that's difficult to hear for management that's made up entirely of programmers (such as at many software startups, even grown to a larger size). Witness the willingness to pay huge premiums for cloud ("infrastructure as code"!) solutions, that eliminates huge low-level scaling opportunities.