> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. Nah, the problem is that most (software) engineers don't have the skills to do operations wor

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. Nah, the problem is that most (software) engineers don't have the skills to do operations work. Let's not fool ourselves: software development is 95% development (writing code/docs/test etc) and 5% system administration (getting your local mysql or whatever up and running etc) whereas operations is usually 95% screaming at the machines (various linux tasks, writing glue scripts, infrastructure, networking etc) and 5% development (the aforementioned glue scripts, writing internal docs). The fields do overlap, but very little. They require two different skill sets. They require two different mindsets, too: a software engineer is usually optimistic (works on my machine, will work in prod too) whereas a sysadmin/operations person is usually pessimistic (what's our disaster recovery strategy?).