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> 90% of the developers and IT staff I work with are GUI only. That's terrible - especially the part about the boss who cares more about toys than productivity

> 90% of the developers and IT staff I work with are GUI only. That's terrible - especially the part about the boss who cares more about toys than productivity and delivery. I hope you can find a way to demonstrate your skills to a talented team who in turn can offer sane working conditions.

raxxorrax 6y ago
> the boss who cares more about toys than productivity and delivery. It is terrible, but very common in my experience. It is the success recipe for Apple to a large degree. Software houses are something different, but if you change to another industry as inhouse dev, the priorities change drastically. It has advantages and disadvantages, but in industry jobs outside of software people just cannot really evaluate the quality of your work. It just needs to look shiny to a degree.
actionowl 6y ago
That is terrible. As a "boss" of an SRE team, we only use the GUI for groking, testing (in a sandbox account), and for a handful of _documented_ things that have to be done in the GUI (usually account wide settings). Everything else, in every "real" environment is in source control, we use Terraform.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
RhodesianHunter 6y ago
Implying that there's something wrong with folks that prefer a GUI to a CLI, and that these people are somehow less talented...
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Artists that paint by numbers are less talented. Oh wow, such a daring thing to say. Of course folks who get scared of a terminal are less "talented" at hardcore IT. That's like a painter being afraid of palets and brushes.
- xfitm3 6y ago
  Anecdotally this has been my experience. Just one sample size out of many but I do prefer working with people who share an affinity for CLI.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    I don't think it's an issue of talent. But a preference for GUIs often hampers people and the work they support. You can't compose GUIs like you can CLIs, and that's important as your workflows become more complex and need to involve more things. You can either extend the GUI (Hah! only if you own it or it's open source) or develop manual processes, or use tools that can automate GUIs but tend to be fragile.
    - oblio 6y ago
      > You can't compose GUIs like you can CLIs You can, actually, but few companies bother to do it. There are quite a few apps with macro functionality, where each GUI option is also a command and you can record those commands. I imagine they have too few users who use that functionality so that's why they're so rare.
      - ByteJockey 6y ago
        By compose I think they meant use two different guis in the same workflow, sort of like how you can pipe the results of one command into another.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    As mentioned on a sibiling thread, when I started in computing CLI was the only option and I don't miss those days. Xerox Computing / Lisp Machines >>>> UNIX CLI My affinity for CLI boils down to Powershell capabilities over classical UNIX shells, including having a REPL and debugger.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  > are GUI only the "only" really does imply that for me.

raxxorrax 6y ago

> the boss who cares more about toys than productivity and delivery. It is terrible, but very common in my experience. It is the success recipe for Apple to a large degree. Software houses are something different, but if you change to another industry as inhouse dev, the priorities change drastically. It has advantages and disadvantages, but in industry jobs outside of software people just cannot really evaluate the quality of your work. It just needs to look shiny to a degree.

actionowl 6y ago

That is terrible. As a "boss" of an SRE team, we only use the GUI for groking, testing (in a sandbox account), and for a handful of _documented_ things that have to be done in the GUI (usually account wide settings). Everything else, in every "real" environment is in source control, we use Terraform.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

RhodesianHunter 6y ago

Implying that there's something wrong with folks that prefer a GUI to a CLI, and that these people are somehow less talented...

mrmonkeyman 6y ago
Artists that paint by numbers are less talented. Oh wow, such a daring thing to say. Of course folks who get scared of a terminal are less "talented" at hardcore IT. That's like a painter being afraid of palets and brushes.
xfitm3 6y ago
Anecdotally this has been my experience. Just one sample size out of many but I do prefer working with people who share an affinity for CLI.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  I don't think it's an issue of talent. But a preference for GUIs often hampers people and the work they support. You can't compose GUIs like you can CLIs, and that's important as your workflows become more complex and need to involve more things. You can either extend the GUI (Hah! only if you own it or it's open source) or develop manual processes, or use tools that can automate GUIs but tend to be fragile.
  - oblio 6y ago
    > You can't compose GUIs like you can CLIs You can, actually, but few companies bother to do it. There are quite a few apps with macro functionality, where each GUI option is also a command and you can record those commands. I imagine they have too few users who use that functionality so that's why they're so rare.
    - ByteJockey 6y ago
      By compose I think they meant use two different guis in the same workflow, sort of like how you can pipe the results of one command into another.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  As mentioned on a sibiling thread, when I started in computing CLI was the only option and I don't miss those days. Xerox Computing / Lisp Machines >>>> UNIX CLI My affinity for CLI boils down to Powershell capabilities over classical UNIX shells, including having a REPL and debugger.
black_puppydog 6y ago
> are GUI only the "only" really does imply that for me.