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There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely

There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. Typically it's regular folks against the office IT people, but for the Hacker News crowd the bogeymen have to be in either Sales or Infrastructure. Nowadays it's not as fashionable to bash the sales people, because the famous tech entrepreneurs and VCs have beaten into our heads how important sales folks are and you don't piss off the income stream. So instead "we enlightened few" take it out on the other one. They're a cost center anyway, right? And as much as most of us think we can productionize some distributed data service serving mega-high volume traffic, we either just can't, can't afford to spend the time to, or would rather not. And we definitely don't want to be paged about it at 3 in the morning on a Sunday either.thank.you.very.much. I can say this confidently because I work on both sides of this fence. So rather than shitting on one of the only "shared jokes" that the people doing that thankless sysadmin job get to enjoy, maybe have a little empathy towards them instead.

tomrod 7y ago
> There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. I'm not sure I buy into this theory. I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. Under such a system they certainly don't work to identify frictions along touch-points.
- busterarm 7y ago
  just read all of the sysadmin-hate in this thread.
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  > I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, I agree with this. > and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. The amorphous "other" is generally "IT" when it comes to anything computer related. IT are the 'big evil' and the cause of most people being unable to do work, if you follow the common narrative. For example, it's IT's fault that this machine is so slow...Not finance's for restricting budgets and using the cheapest RAM/drive configuration they can get away with. It's IT's fault that I can't install this super important Outlook/Chrome/whatever extension that I saw on a blog somewhere. It's also IT's fault if Outlook/Chrome/whatever crashes or is slow because I've installed all these extensions. It's IT's fault that I can't just use wordpress and put custom themes and unvetted PHP code on our main domain so I can do some promotion. It's also IT's fault if that Wordpress install gets hijacked and is used to phish/whatever customers/staff/etc. It's IT's fault that I can't send 500MB attachments and cc 250 people at other companies. It's also IT's fault that the network (and my computer) is so slow when I'm trying to open an email. It's IT's fault that the printers are locked down to only print in B&W, even though they have that colour option - and not because finance is sick of paying for me to print 500 full page colour birthday/soccer/wedding invitations every other month. It's IT's fault that I got phished, even though I ignored the IT security warnings, and slept/skipped through the mandatory online training. It's also IT's fault for letting phishing emails come through, even though it was detected and put in my spam folder with a header clearly saying that it was a suspicious email. It's IT's fault that I can't use an unencrypted USB drive to move files between computers, even thouh it's because we have had too many colleagues leave USB drives full of customer data in taxis or lost in the mail. Don't you understand? IT just makes everyone's life more difficult. I'm playing this up a bit, but these things happen, and people do blame IT for these things.
  - busterarm 7y ago
    Thank you for explaining it in better terms than I could. I was just trying to point out that developers are also super susceptible to this kind of thinking.
th122222 7y ago
The BOFH is largely a funny and positive character. In the end the character is pro-sysadmin, not anti-sysadmin. As a physicist I also would not be insulted by the characters in the "Big Bang Theory", but strangely enough some are. I guess it comes down to having a sense of humor.
- lvturner 7y ago
  Hmm, not sure I agree, the jokes tend to be at the expense of characters with social development issues but even if you put that aside - watch it without a laugh track, it just isn't funny. As an aside I've never thought Friends was funny nor deserved the accolades it got. I wouldn't say I lack a sense of humour either, I'm not overly offended by either of these shows, I just find them genuinely unamusing.
jlg23 7y ago
> So rather than shitting on one of the only "shared jokes" that the people doing that thankless sysadmin job get to enjoy, maybe have a little empathy towards them instead. That's the worst BOFH-comments made by a layer 8 problem I have ever read. We sysops don't need pity, we demand absolute obedience by our l(ocal)users or we'll get all AIX on you! ;)

tomrod 7y ago

> There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do. I'm not sure I buy into this theory. I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. Under such a system they certainly don't work to identify frictions along touch-points.

busterarm 7y ago
just read all of the sysadmin-hate in this thread.
paranoidrobot 7y ago
> I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, I agree with this. > and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. The amorphous "other" is generally "IT" when it comes to anything computer related. IT are the 'big evil' and the cause of most people being unable to do work, if you follow the common narrative. For example, it's IT's fault that this machine is so slow...Not finance's for restricting budgets and using the cheapest RAM/drive configuration they can get away with. It's IT's fault that I can't install this super important Outlook/Chrome/whatever extension that I saw on a blog somewhere. It's also IT's fault if Outlook/Chrome/whatever crashes or is slow because I've installed all these extensions. It's IT's fault that I can't just use wordpress and put custom themes and unvetted PHP code on our main domain so I can do some promotion. It's also IT's fault if that Wordpress install gets hijacked and is used to phish/whatever customers/staff/etc. It's IT's fault that I can't send 500MB attachments and cc 250 people at other companies. It's also IT's fault that the network (and my computer) is so slow when I'm trying to open an email. It's IT's fault that the printers are locked down to only print in B&W, even though they have that colour option - and not because finance is sick of paying for me to print 500 full page colour birthday/soccer/wedding invitations every other month. It's IT's fault that I got phished, even though I ignored the IT security warnings, and slept/skipped through the mandatory online training. It's also IT's fault for letting phishing emails come through, even though it was detected and put in my spam folder with a header clearly saying that it was a suspicious email. It's IT's fault that I can't use an unencrypted USB drive to move files between computers, even thouh it's because we have had too many colleagues leave USB drives full of customer data in taxis or lost in the mail. Don't you understand? IT just makes everyone's life more difficult. I'm playing this up a bit, but these things happen, and people do blame IT for these things.
- busterarm 7y ago
  Thank you for explaining it in better terms than I could. I was just trying to point out that developers are also super susceptible to this kind of thinking.

th122222 7y ago

The BOFH is largely a funny and positive character. In the end the character is pro-sysadmin, not anti-sysadmin. As a physicist I also would not be insulted by the characters in the "Big Bang Theory", but strangely enough some are. I guess it comes down to having a sense of humor.

lvturner 7y ago
Hmm, not sure I agree, the jokes tend to be at the expense of characters with social development issues but even if you put that aside - watch it without a laugh track, it just isn't funny. As an aside I've never thought Friends was funny nor deserved the accolades it got. I wouldn't say I lack a sense of humour either, I'm not overly offended by either of these shows, I just find them genuinely unamusing.

jlg23 7y ago

> So rather than shitting on one of the only "shared jokes" that the people doing that thankless sysadmin job get to enjoy, maybe have a little empathy towards them instead. That's the worst BOFH-comments made by a layer 8 problem I have ever read. We sysops don't need pity, we demand absolute obedience by our l(ocal)users or we'll get all AIX on you! ;)