4 ms·

(edit: looks like, as per a comment further down, a lot of this is five-ish years old; the decisions made in its writing/presentation make a lot more sense in t

(edit: looks like, as per a comment further down, a lot of this is five-ish years old; the decisions made in its writing/presentation make a lot more sense in that light. Leaving comment for posterity.) So I get the overall goal here, but reading this, this feels like somebody's trying to fight the last war. > Since the early 90’s, operations engineers have been in high demand. As a result, these positions often offer high salaries and long term job security. ...because most of the control surfaces offered minimal automation and there were many fewer options for management. This isn't even a "well, AWS/GCP/Azure will eat your lunch" thing, it's a "the robots can do most of this already" thing. There are still roles for network engineers, large-scale datacenter management, and that sort of thing--but this "curriculum" reads as very...hands-on...when a holistic, automation-first approach is overwhelmingly preferred in industry (outside of the trailing edge, where those high salaries and that stability aren't nearly as common). Again: not saying "use the cloud, datacenters don't matter." But I'm not sure that this encompasses what "ops" typically means (as opposed to "IT", which is itself becoming a largely automatable and automated function, or "devops", which will get there sooner than later) and I'm very unsure that places that will still be dealing with data centers in ten years, instead of outsourcing it, will benefit much from juniors with this skillset instead of one built around software definition and a pervasively automation-first mindset.

gowld 8y ago
What happens in 20 years when all the professionals in the industry have no understanding of what their robots do?
- eropple 8y ago
  Then they learn how the robots work? Because their brains work and because they have the underlying plasticity of skillset to pick it up? I'm a software developer first and foremost. When I've needed to deal with hardware, I learned it. And it was easier because the first question was always "OK, now how do we make this something a human doesn't do?". It's a band-pass filter for what actually matters to continued operations.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  They become enslaved, then there is a great war, then everyone starts over and learns everything. I could be confusing this with Dune. [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)
femiagbabiaka 8y ago
courses like this tend to be less of a function of what would be the most useful for the profession as a whole and more of a function of what someone would need to know to get a job. these skills are definitely things people would need to know to get an SRE/DevOps/Ops/IT job in 2019. (I understand that those 4 jobs are not the same.)
- eropple 8y ago
  Thing is, though, if somebody came to me even at my current place (which is very much a trailing-edge shop) with this as the majority of their priors, I probably couldn't hire them. Automation is not the future, automation is the present. The amount of very hand-o-matic stuff being suggested out of this document is inimical to one's employability in this field. Understanding how to systematize and automate is a more employable skill than having a very high-level understanding of, say, Active Directory.
  - femiagbabiaka 8y ago
    I agree — in practice though my interviews in the industry haven’t focused on that at all, instead focusing on Linux fundamentals, OCI, networking, etc. That should change of course.
rconti 8y ago
Not totally off-base, but any time I'm feeling anxious about the value of "old" skills, I realize that might just be SV talking. These "old school" skills will be useful for some time to come in less-cutting-edge orgs, labs, etc.
- eropple 8y ago
  It's not the skills. Skills are whatever; you can learn skills. It's being exposed to, and forced to work through the lens of, a modern mindset that is valuable. Without that that mindset and that lens, you have an expiration date that's a lot closer than most people want to admit--and it's only going to get harder, not easier, as more and more people with that expiration date stamped on their foreheads are competing for fewer and fewer of what amount to (and I don't use this word pejoratively but descriptively) legacy positions. Here's an example of a modern mindset with trailing-edge technologies: I'm having to learn VMware for my current job. I had hoped to literally never do so. (I don't want to manage a data center. But if you use certain cloud providers...you manage a tiny data center.) But I am learning and applying VMware through the lens of pervasive automation and systematization of the problems I'm actually trying to solve. While the team in place before me spent most of their time installing minimal automation (configuration, monitoring, etc.) we are making it a prerequisite of our ownership of the infrastructure for this team's product. Because we like to be able to sleep at night.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Yeah, the mindset is critical. I'm actually 3/4 of the way through the Mindset book, and I definitely see a lot of myself in the fixed mindset; it's gotten worse as I get older, but I'm having a great time learning new things now. I almost stepped back into a role where I could generate a TON of value for the company, but something stopped me. Only later did I realize why it was a good decision. My discomfort at feeling like I'm struggling to learn new things (in a role that was almost ALL new things) made me want to seek refuge in a position where I would be extremely valuable. But it wasn't going to generate value for me. The growth and the learning is valuable for me, and as long as you can find roles that nurture that and allow you to do so, you're winning and growing your skills.

gowld 8y ago

What happens in 20 years when all the professionals in the industry have no understanding of what their robots do?

eropple 8y ago
Then they learn how the robots work? Because their brains work and because they have the underlying plasticity of skillset to pick it up? I'm a software developer first and foremost. When I've needed to deal with hardware, I learned it. And it was easier because the first question was always "OK, now how do we make this something a human doesn't do?". It's a band-pass filter for what actually matters to continued operations.
LinuxBender 8y ago
They become enslaved, then there is a great war, then everyone starts over and learns everything. I could be confusing this with Dune. [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)

femiagbabiaka 8y ago

courses like this tend to be less of a function of what would be the most useful for the profession as a whole and more of a function of what someone would need to know to get a job. these skills are definitely things people would need to know to get an SRE/DevOps/Ops/IT job in 2019. (I understand that those 4 jobs are not the same.)

eropple 8y ago
Thing is, though, if somebody came to me even at my current place (which is very much a trailing-edge shop) with this as the majority of their priors, I probably couldn't hire them. Automation is not the future, automation is the present. The amount of very hand-o-matic stuff being suggested out of this document is inimical to one's employability in this field. Understanding how to systematize and automate is a more employable skill than having a very high-level understanding of, say, Active Directory.
- femiagbabiaka 8y ago
  I agree — in practice though my interviews in the industry haven’t focused on that at all, instead focusing on Linux fundamentals, OCI, networking, etc. That should change of course.

rconti 8y ago

Not totally off-base, but any time I'm feeling anxious about the value of "old" skills, I realize that might just be SV talking. These "old school" skills will be useful for some time to come in less-cutting-edge orgs, labs, etc.

eropple 8y ago
It's not the skills. Skills are whatever; you can learn skills. It's being exposed to, and forced to work through the lens of, a modern mindset that is valuable. Without that that mindset and that lens, you have an expiration date that's a lot closer than most people want to admit--and it's only going to get harder, not easier, as more and more people with that expiration date stamped on their foreheads are competing for fewer and fewer of what amount to (and I don't use this word pejoratively but descriptively) legacy positions. Here's an example of a modern mindset with trailing-edge technologies: I'm having to learn VMware for my current job. I had hoped to literally never do so. (I don't want to manage a data center. But if you use certain cloud providers...you manage a tiny data center.) But I am learning and applying VMware through the lens of pervasive automation and systematization of the problems I'm actually trying to solve. While the team in place before me spent most of their time installing minimal automation (configuration, monitoring, etc.) we are making it a prerequisite of our ownership of the infrastructure for this team's product. Because we like to be able to sleep at night.
- rconti 8y ago
  Yeah, the mindset is critical. I'm actually 3/4 of the way through the Mindset book, and I definitely see a lot of myself in the fixed mindset; it's gotten worse as I get older, but I'm having a great time learning new things now. I almost stepped back into a role where I could generate a TON of value for the company, but something stopped me. Only later did I realize why it was a good decision. My discomfort at feeling like I'm struggling to learn new things (in a role that was almost ALL new things) made me want to seek refuge in a position where I would be extremely valuable. But it wasn't going to generate value for me. The growth and the learning is valuable for me, and as long as you can find roles that nurture that and allow you to do so, you're winning and growing your skills.