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The problem is not whether to test in prod or not, the problem is who gets prod access. When I started as a Linux sysadmin almost 20 years ago I did not get pro

The problem is not whether to test in prod or not, the problem is who gets prod access. When I started as a Linux sysadmin almost 20 years ago I did not get prod root access for a full year. The care and respect for production was drilled into me army style. Root access was considered a privilege one earns. Oldish man rant: IT has been McDonaldised. People don't spend significantly more than one year at the same job and companies desire weeks long induction after which new employees should ship code. Developers don't understand TCP/IP, they don't understand DNS, HTTP, databases, IO, OS process and memory management, etc. Of course you can't allow production access for "I just import the library and start coding". I even suspect K8s to be nothing more than a standardized way to arrange the ice box, potato fryer and grill so anybody can just start flipping burgers on day one.

3pt14159 5y ago
I understand all those things? Everyone I work with does except for maybe memory management? If you said assembly or Fortran or Cobol, sure. But most good developers know these concepts.
- dcow 5y ago
  Your comment is a tautology.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    I mean, not really? There's an implicit frequency hint with the word "good" that implies that it's not so rare as to not be present in a non-trivial portion of the population. If someone said to me "most good doctors can cure metastasize diffuse stomach cancer" and then later said "too bad only 1 in a million doctors are good" I'd roll my eyes pretty hard at them. But if the ratio is closer to 5% then I'd say it's a pretty fair ratio. Anyway, back to the original point. I think anyone that's dealt with even high level languages like Python or Ruby has managed their way through almost all of those things. They're not so rare.
    - dcow 5y ago
      I am saying that the logical proposition in your comment is inarguably true. You’ve classified good engineers as those that know the things that make good engineers good and then stated that most all good engineers know these things. It sounds like you are now also saying you only work with good engineers and also that good acceptably applies to the set of engineers in the top 95th percentile. I don’t think my tautology comment contests anything you’ve said. I would say your experience seems to be biased. In my experience it’s usually a coin toss or two (top 50-25th percentile) wether an engineer just knows syntax or actually understands the machine they’re programming. But that’s just anecdotal and it doesn't seem super apropos to quibble over where that line is drawn at a population level in this thread.

3pt14159 5y ago

I understand all those things? Everyone I work with does except for maybe memory management? If you said assembly or Fortran or Cobol, sure. But most good developers know these concepts.

dcow 5y ago
Your comment is a tautology.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  I mean, not really? There's an implicit frequency hint with the word "good" that implies that it's not so rare as to not be present in a non-trivial portion of the population. If someone said to me "most good doctors can cure metastasize diffuse stomach cancer" and then later said "too bad only 1 in a million doctors are good" I'd roll my eyes pretty hard at them. But if the ratio is closer to 5% then I'd say it's a pretty fair ratio. Anyway, back to the original point. I think anyone that's dealt with even high level languages like Python or Ruby has managed their way through almost all of those things. They're not so rare.
  - dcow 5y ago
    I am saying that the logical proposition in your comment is inarguably true. You’ve classified good engineers as those that know the things that make good engineers good and then stated that most all good engineers know these things. It sounds like you are now also saying you only work with good engineers and also that good acceptably applies to the set of engineers in the top 95th percentile. I don’t think my tautology comment contests anything you’ve said. I would say your experience seems to be biased. In my experience it’s usually a coin toss or two (top 50-25th percentile) wether an engineer just knows syntax or actually understands the machine they’re programming. But that’s just anecdotal and it doesn't seem super apropos to quibble over where that line is drawn at a population level in this thread.