2 ms·

I am sorry but I just laughed at this. 20 years ago sysadmins used perl and bash to automate everything. Now devs that don't understand OS, networking, package

I am sorry but I just laughed at this. 20 years ago sysadmins used perl and bash to automate everything. Now devs that don't understand OS, networking, package managers, etc, think they will obsolete ops people by writing yaml configuration for a 0.12 version software, looking at its source code and fixing the limitations. May God have mercy on your soul as the hell you have developed for yourself has none.

Spivak 5y ago
Look, I am that ops person sans the age. I desperately want to one of these mythical graybeards to show up for an interview but it just doesn't happen. I get "senior" UNIX sysadmins that can't write a basic Python script despite it being on their resumes [1], can't mock out a basic HA web architecture or a logging pipeline, and can't explain at all how Linux namespaces work. We tried to hire someone senior for 8 months before giving up and just grabbing a junior dev that wanted to do infra stuff and trained him up. I have worked at shops with people like you describe but it seems they're all happily employed. [1] Not whiteboard style, on their own time, on their own computer, not timed or watched. They can take a week for all we care.
- trabant00 5y ago
  This is your personal recruiting problem and has nothing to do with "all the best ops start as devs" statement that you made. I have no idea how you could find true experienced sysadmins in your case. They exist though, that much I can tell you. I have 20 years of experience, I write bash, python, perl and lately mostly go. I am not a greybeard as I am just old enough to have been a junior for the greybeards that wrote linux kernel patches among other things to solve infra problems.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I mean how could I know which part of my comment you took issue with, I was describing my recruiting experience. I still stand by that statement though -- doesn't matter if they've been doing it for 2 years or 20 all the best ops people started on their path by being a dev who found themselves as the ops person of last resort and fell in love with it. The experience gained by being thrown into responsibility for a production system and having to figure it out in real time genuinely can't be beat.
    - hcrean 5y ago
      If a company is having trouble recruiting, it normally means the package on offer just isn't competitive. Remote work and money are the big ones nowadays. It might also mean your company is unattractive to engineers; location, negative reviews, difficult tech stack, business model based around clubbing baby puppies... Whatever it is. I have led Ops teams in one shape or another for about 10 years. I second that having a junior dev do Ops work without supervision will not bring joy to your life, mostly because they do the darnedest things! One of the trainees here decided to remove a ControlTower guardrail from a root account, for a personal experiment in a sandbox; then three weeks later created a public S3 bucket in a production subaccount and leaked a bunch of data... 90% of developers just don't have the mindset for Ops work.

Spivak 5y ago

Look, I am that ops person sans the age. I desperately want to one of these mythical graybeards to show up for an interview but it just doesn't happen. I get "senior" UNIX sysadmins that can't write a basic Python script despite it being on their resumes [1], can't mock out a basic HA web architecture or a logging pipeline, and can't explain at all how Linux namespaces work. We tried to hire someone senior for 8 months before giving up and just grabbing a junior dev that wanted to do infra stuff and trained him up. I have worked at shops with people like you describe but it seems they're all happily employed. [1] Not whiteboard style, on their own time, on their own computer, not timed or watched. They can take a week for all we care.

trabant00 5y ago
This is your personal recruiting problem and has nothing to do with "all the best ops start as devs" statement that you made. I have no idea how you could find true experienced sysadmins in your case. They exist though, that much I can tell you. I have 20 years of experience, I write bash, python, perl and lately mostly go. I am not a greybeard as I am just old enough to have been a junior for the greybeards that wrote linux kernel patches among other things to solve infra problems.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I mean how could I know which part of my comment you took issue with, I was describing my recruiting experience. I still stand by that statement though -- doesn't matter if they've been doing it for 2 years or 20 all the best ops people started on their path by being a dev who found themselves as the ops person of last resort and fell in love with it. The experience gained by being thrown into responsibility for a production system and having to figure it out in real time genuinely can't be beat.
  - hcrean 5y ago
    If a company is having trouble recruiting, it normally means the package on offer just isn't competitive. Remote work and money are the big ones nowadays. It might also mean your company is unattractive to engineers; location, negative reviews, difficult tech stack, business model based around clubbing baby puppies... Whatever it is. I have led Ops teams in one shape or another for about 10 years. I second that having a junior dev do Ops work without supervision will not bring joy to your life, mostly because they do the darnedest things! One of the trainees here decided to remove a ControlTower guardrail from a root account, for a personal experiment in a sandbox; then three weeks later created a public S3 bucket in a production subaccount and leaked a bunch of data... 90% of developers just don't have the mindset for Ops work.