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Over the last ten years, the market has tried to kill off the hardware, systems, network and security people, and mostly succeeded. As a result, it's relativel

by dsr_ 4y ago

Over the last ten years, the market has tried to kill off the hardware, systems, network and security people, and mostly succeeded. As a result, it's relatively easy to find someone who advertises as "full stack devops" who has never actually operated any infrastructure more complex than a LAMP webserver cluster. And it's hard to find a senior sysadmin who has enough years of experience to understand and troubleshoot all of your infrastructure from layer 0 up. People with that experience have moved into management or consulting or retirement, and there are no jobs for new folks.

Melatonic 4y ago
It cracks me up everytime I talk to some very competent and senior devs who have zero knowledge of hardware - cloud has spoiled us! Also the amount of devs who have had to work in shops with really crappy on prem infrastructure setups is also amazing - I guess I have just been lucky to work at places with solid infra
vigeek 4y ago
Based on my own experiences, one of the most disappointing elements of devops is their lack of understanding how things work. They run to GitHub and pull other peoples recipes to build out certain environments. Even when they build automation from scratch, they miss tons of core OS level tunables and rather than adjusting those, they'll just add more servers to the mix. I worked at a place that had an elastic search cluster with 30 nodes, because they kept hitting open file limits, when 8 servers could easily handle the traffic with basic tuning.
- Corrado 4y ago
  You could replace "devops" in your first paragraph with "developers" and it would still make sense. Everybody is out there grabbing stuff from GitHub and shoving it into their projects. Most technical folks today don't really know how a computer works, they poke at it until it does what they want and call it a day. And I would say that your specific example is a failing of that team, not "DevOps" as a whole.
kazen44 4y ago
> Over the last ten years, the market has tried to kill off the hardware, systems, network and security people, and mostly succeeded. In my experience, people who want to do interesting work on networking and systems. (Think, building large scale networks and systems with high resillience) dont want to work for smaller companies anymore. They either work at: A) highly specialized companies which fit their niche. (ISP's or IXP's for instance). B) do consulting and project based work for a lot of companies who have very specific requirements. (Think, building a identity provider system for a country etc). Small scale complexity has been disappearing because everyone just throws hardware at the problem instead of thinking about how to architecture their infra "correctly". Why optimize your OS's scheduler parameters to get more performance from your filesystem when you have nearly free VC money and a budget to burn on resources in AWS?

by dsr_ 4y ago

Melatonic 4y ago

It cracks me up everytime I talk to some very competent and senior devs who have zero knowledge of hardware - cloud has spoiled us! Also the amount of devs who have had to work in shops with really crappy on prem infrastructure setups is also amazing - I guess I have just been lucky to work at places with solid infra

vigeek 4y ago

Based on my own experiences, one of the most disappointing elements of devops is their lack of understanding how things work. They run to GitHub and pull other peoples recipes to build out certain environments. Even when they build automation from scratch, they miss tons of core OS level tunables and rather than adjusting those, they'll just add more servers to the mix. I worked at a place that had an elastic search cluster with 30 nodes, because they kept hitting open file limits, when 8 servers could easily handle the traffic with basic tuning.

Corrado 4y ago
You could replace "devops" in your first paragraph with "developers" and it would still make sense. Everybody is out there grabbing stuff from GitHub and shoving it into their projects. Most technical folks today don't really know how a computer works, they poke at it until it does what they want and call it a day. And I would say that your specific example is a failing of that team, not "DevOps" as a whole.

kazen44 4y ago

> Over the last ten years, the market has tried to kill off the hardware, systems, network and security people, and mostly succeeded. In my experience, people who want to do interesting work on networking and systems. (Think, building large scale networks and systems with high resillience) dont want to work for smaller companies anymore. They either work at: A) highly specialized companies which fit their niche. (ISP's or IXP's for instance). B) do consulting and project based work for a lot of companies who have very specific requirements. (Think, building a identity provider system for a country etc). Small scale complexity has been disappearing because everyone just throws hardware at the problem instead of thinking about how to architecture their infra "correctly". Why optimize your OS's scheduler parameters to get more performance from your filesystem when you have nearly free VC money and a budget to burn on resources in AWS?