5 ms·

So, we're playing with the terms ? That's it ? As a sysadmin, I'm fine with the concept of continual improvement, there is nothing worse than a static industry

by jvehent 15y ago

So, we're playing with the terms ? That's it ? As a sysadmin, I'm fine with the concept of continual improvement, there is nothing worse than a static industry. The job is changing every day and this.is.good. What I understand from this post is that startup people don't want to deal with sysadmin anymore. It makes a lot of sense, considering the amount of time/energy/money you need to run a stable infrastructure. But at the same time, heroku, ec2 & al. will never be able to cover everybody's needs. So while I'm convinced that a dev or devops will be fine deploying his webapp to some random cloud, I'm also convinced they will come crying when massive load hits them and they can't tune the system. The sysadmin is not only the guy who configure new servers, it's also the guy who explains the new dev dude that, no, he can't do 15 inner joins on large tables to create the home page because it will stress the IOs so bad that the whole website will collapse. Ease of use != flexibility.

tptacek 15y ago
If you can explain SQL optimization to a developer, you're doing yourself a huge disservice by saying that you're a "sysadmin".
- Goladus 15y ago
  No, the problem is arrogant programmers who imagine that sysadmins are people who only know how to configure an apache virtualhost. Although in the case of SQL, specifically, database administration has historically been a specialized sub-category of system administration.
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    I worked as an intern for the SQL server project. If you can explain accurately how to optimally structure SQL queries, you can probably write database code yourself.
    - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
      Not if you haven't mastered a programming language to write it in.
      - Locke1689 15y ago
        Programming languages are simply syntactic representations of predefined concepts. For the most part, if you can understand the concept the programming language isn't hard to pick up. Hell, I taught myself Python when I was 9 years old -- it wasn't the syntax of the programming language that was hard or the reason why I wasn't instantly a good developer. I needed (and still need) the real world experience of understanding the complexities of real software in order to develop real software. Anyone who understands these complexities and is only hampered by knowing the syntax of a programming language is underselling themselves -- with only a little more hard work they should be able to easily begin a development career.
    - Goladus 15y ago
      > If you can explain accurately how to optimally structure SQL queries, you can probably write database code yourself. Yes, probably. That doesn't mean your role on the project, in the company, or in your job description isn't "Database Administrator." Or operations engineer or reliability engineer or whatever fancy name you want to call the fact that you are more responsible for running the system than building it. A more realistic example, though, is that a DBA and developer collaborate; the DBA collects and analyzes data from the production system and shares this information along with recommendations to the developer, who is ultimately responsible for restructuring the query. In a very small team there's probably no need for these roles to be divided.
      - Locke1689 15y ago
        Sure, but I think that in this case the difference between your view of an operations engineer and a developer are fairly minimal in terms of skill. They're both development roles. When I was interning at Google I noticed that these roles were differentiated as SRE and SWE. I didn't notice a lot of competency difference, just different application areas of the same competence. I think many SREs and SWEs could probably switch roles successfully.
- jvehent 15y ago
  So what do you call a sysadmin exactly ?
tytso 15y ago
It very much is about the terms. 20-25 years ago a sysadmin was expected to be able to fix C bugs, and have skills not that far removed from programming in assembly (i.e., sendmail.cf files :-). About ten years ago I remember talking to some old timers who were surprised that a lot of the younger sysadmins no longer even did any perl progamming, but rather did things like program Cisco rounters and set up Oracle servers. At Google we don't have sysadmins at all, but rather "Site Reliability Engineers", and they are expected to be able to answer some fairly deep C/C++ data structure and algorithms questions. All of those skills are necessary to run a Google-sized infrastructure, and it's quite a far cry from the sysadmins that don't even write perl scripts any more -- and yet feel perfectly free to call themselves "sysadmins". When I first started, I both wore a pager and wrote C programs --- including the 'ninit' program that was described in the Unix haters handbook. The fact that I was one of the people who might be woken up at 3am when the mail server melted down due to named core dumping informed how I wrote my C programs (i.e., very defensively), and is a prime example of the dev/ops concept.
- jvehent 15y ago
  So we agree on the definition of what a sysadmin, systems engineers, devops or whatever people want to call it should be. A sysadmin must program, that's a given. When did we forget that exactly ? But why are so many devs shooting at the sysadmins these days ? I never read anything from sysadmins complaining about the astonishingly low level of knowledge of a lot of devs. And they are numerous, willingly ignoring even the most basic performance issues and vomiting thousands of lines of codes, hundreds of tons of libraries, to simple problems. It seems that devs are frustrated to not be able to push their random app to the web in 5 minutes, and throw their love to PaaS like an apple geek discovering the new iphone, blaming the sysadmins for not providing the same thing at their own company without even understanding (or trying to understand) how operating systems work, and how their own code should be built. The real issue here is that when devs and sysadmins DON'T work together, and ignore each others problems, constantly blaming each other, then the result sucks. When the sysadmins are 20% devs, and the devs 20% sysadmins, and they drink their coffees together in the morning, you don't see that kind of problem. They built good, reliable, scalable infrastructure, whether it's in the cloud or in the basement of their house.

by jvehent 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

If you can explain SQL optimization to a developer, you're doing yourself a huge disservice by saying that you're a "sysadmin".

Goladus 15y ago
No, the problem is arrogant programmers who imagine that sysadmins are people who only know how to configure an apache virtualhost. Although in the case of SQL, specifically, database administration has historically been a specialized sub-category of system administration.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  I worked as an intern for the SQL server project. If you can explain accurately how to optimally structure SQL queries, you can probably write database code yourself.
  - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
    Not if you haven't mastered a programming language to write it in.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      Programming languages are simply syntactic representations of predefined concepts. For the most part, if you can understand the concept the programming language isn't hard to pick up. Hell, I taught myself Python when I was 9 years old -- it wasn't the syntax of the programming language that was hard or the reason why I wasn't instantly a good developer. I needed (and still need) the real world experience of understanding the complexities of real software in order to develop real software. Anyone who understands these complexities and is only hampered by knowing the syntax of a programming language is underselling themselves -- with only a little more hard work they should be able to easily begin a development career.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    > If you can explain accurately how to optimally structure SQL queries, you can probably write database code yourself. Yes, probably. That doesn't mean your role on the project, in the company, or in your job description isn't "Database Administrator." Or operations engineer or reliability engineer or whatever fancy name you want to call the fact that you are more responsible for running the system than building it. A more realistic example, though, is that a DBA and developer collaborate; the DBA collects and analyzes data from the production system and shares this information along with recommendations to the developer, who is ultimately responsible for restructuring the query. In a very small team there's probably no need for these roles to be divided.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      Sure, but I think that in this case the difference between your view of an operations engineer and a developer are fairly minimal in terms of skill. They're both development roles. When I was interning at Google I noticed that these roles were differentiated as SRE and SWE. I didn't notice a lot of competency difference, just different application areas of the same competence. I think many SREs and SWEs could probably switch roles successfully.
jvehent 15y ago
So what do you call a sysadmin exactly ?

tytso 15y ago

It very much is about the terms. 20-25 years ago a sysadmin was expected to be able to fix C bugs, and have skills not that far removed from programming in assembly (i.e., sendmail.cf files :-). About ten years ago I remember talking to some old timers who were surprised that a lot of the younger sysadmins no longer even did any perl progamming, but rather did things like program Cisco rounters and set up Oracle servers. At Google we don't have sysadmins at all, but rather "Site Reliability Engineers", and they are expected to be able to answer some fairly deep C/C++ data structure and algorithms questions. All of those skills are necessary to run a Google-sized infrastructure, and it's quite a far cry from the sysadmins that don't even write perl scripts any more -- and yet feel perfectly free to call themselves "sysadmins". When I first started, I both wore a pager and wrote C programs --- including the 'ninit' program that was described in the Unix haters handbook. The fact that I was one of the people who might be woken up at 3am when the mail server melted down due to named core dumping informed how I wrote my C programs (i.e., very defensively), and is a prime example of the dev/ops concept.

jvehent 15y ago
So we agree on the definition of what a sysadmin, systems engineers, devops or whatever people want to call it should be. A sysadmin must program, that's a given. When did we forget that exactly ? But why are so many devs shooting at the sysadmins these days ? I never read anything from sysadmins complaining about the astonishingly low level of knowledge of a lot of devs. And they are numerous, willingly ignoring even the most basic performance issues and vomiting thousands of lines of codes, hundreds of tons of libraries, to simple problems. It seems that devs are frustrated to not be able to push their random app to the web in 5 minutes, and throw their love to PaaS like an apple geek discovering the new iphone, blaming the sysadmins for not providing the same thing at their own company without even understanding (or trying to understand) how operating systems work, and how their own code should be built. The real issue here is that when devs and sysadmins DON'T work together, and ignore each others problems, constantly blaming each other, then the result sucks. When the sysadmins are 20% devs, and the devs 20% sysadmins, and they drink their coffees together in the morning, you don't see that kind of problem. They built good, reliable, scalable infrastructure, whether it's in the cloud or in the basement of their house.