4 ms·

I find this hard to believe. Maybe if one is still living in the mainframe era and doesn't have a truly personal computer at all. Do you have any real examples

by nene 16y ago

I find this hard to believe. Maybe if one is still living in the mainframe era and doesn't have a truly personal computer at all. Do you have any real examples of this?

fiveo 16y ago
There are programmers like this today. They can install Windows and MS Office but once something more complex happened in their Workstation at the office, they'll call Sys Admin to fix it for them. It's a mix of laziness and doesn't want to know more outside VB/C#. It's for an excuse to get a coffee break, a smoke break, or something else.
zerohp 16y ago
My current employer has about 50 programmers and another 50 semi-programmer scientists all working on Linux. None of them have root access to any machine except their OSX laptop and most don't know how to install software thats more difficult than drag and drop. There's certainly multiple levels of comfort with software installation in this environment. Many of our good programmers get frustrated and end up asking systems to install programs or work almost entirely on their OSX laptop. Personally I don't find it too limiting because I am comfortable installing in my home directory.
- trafficlight 16y ago
  I used to work as a sysadmin at a small development shop that had 6 programmers. Those guys didn't have root access either, but it's not because they weren't competent; it was the only way we could keep the machines consistent. Otherwise, people were installing things all over the place and, in a lot of cases, the same program would be installed differently on each machine.
- Goladus 16y ago
  The reason system administrators have responsibility for installing and configuring software on production systems isn't because programmers don't know (or can't learn) how to do it themselves. It's typically because production systems are multi-user with uptime SLAs, meaning that software must be installed and configured in a reliable, repeatable way that works for everyone, not just one person. The fact that sysadmins do often have that responsibility, though, means that sometimes programmers have less incentive to learn it themselves.
Goladus 16y ago
Not a specific example that I'm willing to describe in public, no. It's more common among junior and student programmers, for languages like C++ where there are lots of compiler and linker settings that are frequently different from one installation to the next, and where heavyweight IDEs are involved (Visual Studio, Eclipse).
xyzzyb 16y ago
The programming team I currently work with is like this. The shop is PHP (legacy) and Django (new); but no one has any tools on their own computers. All development is done on a series of servers: alpha to beta to pre-production to production.

by nene 16y ago

I find this hard to believe. Maybe if one is still living in the mainframe era and doesn't have a truly personal computer at all. Do you have any real examples of this?

fiveo 16y ago

There are programmers like this today. They can install Windows and MS Office but once something more complex happened in their Workstation at the office, they'll call Sys Admin to fix it for them. It's a mix of laziness and doesn't want to know more outside VB/C#. It's for an excuse to get a coffee break, a smoke break, or something else.

zerohp 16y ago

My current employer has about 50 programmers and another 50 semi-programmer scientists all working on Linux. None of them have root access to any machine except their OSX laptop and most don't know how to install software thats more difficult than drag and drop. There's certainly multiple levels of comfort with software installation in this environment. Many of our good programmers get frustrated and end up asking systems to install programs or work almost entirely on their OSX laptop. Personally I don't find it too limiting because I am comfortable installing in my home directory.

trafficlight 16y ago
I used to work as a sysadmin at a small development shop that had 6 programmers. Those guys didn't have root access either, but it's not because they weren't competent; it was the only way we could keep the machines consistent. Otherwise, people were installing things all over the place and, in a lot of cases, the same program would be installed differently on each machine.
Goladus 16y ago
The reason system administrators have responsibility for installing and configuring software on production systems isn't because programmers don't know (or can't learn) how to do it themselves. It's typically because production systems are multi-user with uptime SLAs, meaning that software must be installed and configured in a reliable, repeatable way that works for everyone, not just one person. The fact that sysadmins do often have that responsibility, though, means that sometimes programmers have less incentive to learn it themselves.

Goladus 16y ago

Not a specific example that I'm willing to describe in public, no. It's more common among junior and student programmers, for languages like C++ where there are lots of compiler and linker settings that are frequently different from one installation to the next, and where heavyweight IDEs are involved (Visual Studio, Eclipse).

xyzzyb 16y ago

The programming team I currently work with is like this. The shop is PHP (legacy) and Django (new); but no one has any tools on their own computers. All development is done on a series of servers: alpha to beta to pre-production to production.