3 ms·

A devops team is in practice typically very different than a sysadmin team. Good sysadmins automate the hell out of everything, but it’s usually not something

A devops team is in practice typically very different than a sysadmin team. Good sysadmins automate the hell out of everything, but it’s usually not something other people can use. Devops teams automate all of that stuff but then they also let teams build new infrastructure when they do deploys and automate that whole process, but it’s client facing. It’s development and operations, it’s a pretty good name, though I think platform or production engineering is typically a better name.

hinkley 3y ago
The quality of devops scripts, from the perspective of a person who likes to write code that has to work right the first time, is about two standard deviations better than sysadmin scripts. But still of a par that would keep someone from getting promoted past a Senior Dev title. What’s worse is they can be condescending while shoveling out absolute garbage. If I’m honest that’s the part that bugs me the most.
- dijit 3y ago
  I don't deny your experience, but my experience is that when it comes to domain specific scripts sysadmins fared much better than developers. I still see this, developers use archaic or absurd incantations in their build-scripts because they kludge something that works in bash on their machine then push it into yaml and move on, forgetting to comment, document or try to simplify the line so that it's easy to break apart later when it has to be debugged. Some of the best interpreted code I have ever seen came from a former sysadmin (it was powershell though, that comes with it's own warts of course). The issue is that we collectively decided that sysadmins should just stop existing instead of allowing it to grow properly. We forget how bad things were for developers back when we decided we didn't like sysadmins. There were companies still passing around code on a USB stick because developers didn't want to depend on SVN being down. (I am not kidding). Git was introduced 2005 and wasn't really everywhere until 2012, but 2014 sysadmins had all but been retired. This is the timeframe we talk about. Developers of that time were as bad as the sysadmins were, the problem was that the developers had time and space to grow and we judge the developers of 2012 as if they had all the tools, knowledge and incremental improvements in workflow that they have today.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    I think part of this issue is: what is a sysadmin? That’s a pretty hard question to answer today. Maybe it was more straight forward in the 80s or 90s. But if you go to /r/sysadmin you have desktop support, help desk, office 365 admins who only use a gui, solo it guy in a small business, and also programmers, devops, cloud architects and network engineers. The sysadmins who were already automating large amounts of tasks for n Unix servers and k switches with p services, had a vastly different skill set and migrated to the more modern software defined devops SRe world no problem. But plenty of sysadmins basically could (and some still) only use a gui, and do things from trial and error. Those people might have retired or become managers, but they had a lot more issues with the transition. Which to be fair the transition happened fast and hard in some companies.

hinkley 3y ago

The quality of devops scripts, from the perspective of a person who likes to write code that has to work right the first time, is about two standard deviations better than sysadmin scripts. But still of a par that would keep someone from getting promoted past a Senior Dev title. What’s worse is they can be condescending while shoveling out absolute garbage. If I’m honest that’s the part that bugs me the most.

dijit 3y ago
I don't deny your experience, but my experience is that when it comes to domain specific scripts sysadmins fared much better than developers. I still see this, developers use archaic or absurd incantations in their build-scripts because they kludge something that works in bash on their machine then push it into yaml and move on, forgetting to comment, document or try to simplify the line so that it's easy to break apart later when it has to be debugged. Some of the best interpreted code I have ever seen came from a former sysadmin (it was powershell though, that comes with it's own warts of course). The issue is that we collectively decided that sysadmins should just stop existing instead of allowing it to grow properly. We forget how bad things were for developers back when we decided we didn't like sysadmins. There were companies still passing around code on a USB stick because developers didn't want to depend on SVN being down. (I am not kidding). Git was introduced 2005 and wasn't really everywhere until 2012, but 2014 sysadmins had all but been retired. This is the timeframe we talk about. Developers of that time were as bad as the sysadmins were, the problem was that the developers had time and space to grow and we judge the developers of 2012 as if they had all the tools, knowledge and incremental improvements in workflow that they have today.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  I think part of this issue is: what is a sysadmin? That’s a pretty hard question to answer today. Maybe it was more straight forward in the 80s or 90s. But if you go to /r/sysadmin you have desktop support, help desk, office 365 admins who only use a gui, solo it guy in a small business, and also programmers, devops, cloud architects and network engineers. The sysadmins who were already automating large amounts of tasks for n Unix servers and k switches with p services, had a vastly different skill set and migrated to the more modern software defined devops SRe world no problem. But plenty of sysadmins basically could (and some still) only use a gui, and do things from trial and error. Those people might have retired or become managers, but they had a lot more issues with the transition. Which to be fair the transition happened fast and hard in some companies.