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> People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches What you describe is what used to

> People used to have to rack their own hardware, install PDUs, check temperature gauges, plug wires, configure the switches What you describe is what used to be considered sysadmin work. I too did quite a bit of it, but most of it went to people who specialized in those things. And no, I don't do any of it now. On any given day I'll probably deal with machines in at least a dozen geographic locations across two continents, and if I tried to enter any of them I'd be stopped at the door - no, at the gate before I even got to the buildings. Instead, I write code to interact with the deployment system and the provisioning system and the multiple monitoring systems and the automatic remediation system and so on. Is it better? It scales better, but as a matter of personal satisfaction and avoiding fury at other people's crappy code I think I'd rather be plugging in cables and configuring switches. > I think because some of the hard stuff got a lot easier, the easier stuff got unnecessarily complex. There's a lot of truth to that, and I don't think we necessarily disagree on the outcome. However we got here, whichever specific things make modern software development more unpleasant, it seems that it is more unpleasant than it used to be.

leothekim 6y ago
Re: the sysadmin work, app developers have to worry a whole lot less about it, oftentimes not at all. In startups, that's a huge plus. I still remember servers going down because some workloads were destroying the RAID arrays s.t. that they were drawing down too much power and overloading the PDUs in their racks. I ended up having to hardwire the distribution of jobs to other servers while we (actually it was me, I was at a startup) got the PDUs upgraded by talking to a sysadmin on the phone. (Amusingly at some point we had to fix some DNS while restarting one of the boxes so I had to tell the guy what to do by dictating vi commands.) But yeah it's like over time we ended up scaling the crappiness of software along with the software itself. At the same time, I'm inclined to believe that software development at large is in a much better position to solve a whole bunch of other problems than ever before. That keeps me motivated personally, though I get the frustrations for sure.

leothekim 6y ago

Re: the sysadmin work, app developers have to worry a whole lot less about it, oftentimes not at all. In startups, that's a huge plus. I still remember servers going down because some workloads were destroying the RAID arrays s.t. that they were drawing down too much power and overloading the PDUs in their racks. I ended up having to hardwire the distribution of jobs to other servers while we (actually it was me, I was at a startup) got the PDUs upgraded by talking to a sysadmin on the phone. (Amusingly at some point we had to fix some DNS while restarting one of the boxes so I had to tell the guy what to do by dictating vi commands.) But yeah it's like over time we ended up scaling the crappiness of software along with the software itself. At the same time, I'm inclined to believe that software development at large is in a much better position to solve a whole bunch of other problems than ever before. That keeps me motivated personally, though I get the frustrations for sure.