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This is the elephant in the room: all "new" technology isn't fundamentally new. Terraform is just curl with state management for lots of different websites, And
by sadops 2y ago
This is the elephant in the room: all "new" technology isn't fundamentally new. Terraform is just curl with state management for lots of different websites, Andible is just a YAML to Bash converter, and so on. If you have good fundamentals, not only are these things easy, they're also incredibly frustrating, because you can easily see their limitations. You can always tell how experienced someone is by how well they know what a given tool is actually doing under the hood. People who exhibit shock and awe will just mess up your codebase, because they have no clue how the machine actually works.
No, I want to hire the grumpy, cynical greybeards, because they know their fundamentals, and they're immune to shiny bullshit.
There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!" And yet, we have threads like this, where we find out, SHOCKER, that the best codebases are the ones maintained by like... four senior developers, half of whom contributed to several Internet RFCs, and half of whom used to work at Bell Labs.
I feel like we are through the looking glass.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- udev4096 2y agoAnsible is a lot more than just "YAML to Bash". For instance, Bash scripts are not idempotent. Ansible playbooks are. Sure, you can hack together a way to ssh and run commands very easily but it will break at some point
- p_l 2y agoAnsible playbooks are as idempotent as bash scripts. You need to include checks when writing them so they actually are idempotent, just like with bash script, and they happily leak idempotency-breaking details like "restarting a service" works only if a) service currently runs b) because "restart" is a command, not expected state of "the service was restarted and is now running
- bigstrat2003 2y agoBash scripts are as idempotent as you want to make them, so I think the comparison holds.
- udev4096 2y agoIf it were that easy, no one would be using Ansible
- sgarland 2y ago> There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!" I’m told this is gatekeeping. Yes, and…? I’ve always found it amusing that I see little to no anger being directed at kernel devs for their gatekeeping. Almost as if deep down, people know that they shouldn’t be fucking with the thing that runs the world unless they are actually good at it. Or maybe they’re just afraid of Torvalds.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI agree that "gatekeeping" gets a bad rap. Sure, it can be taken too far. But at the end of the day, one needs to actually be qualified. And if they aren't, well sorry but you aren't good enough for the job. It doesn't make you a bad person, it just means you need to work on your skills before you're a fit.
- sgarland 2y agoRight. I don’t apply to jobs that cite a need for a decade of experience with data center-scale networking, for example, because I don’t have that. Not even close. I don’t view that as gatekeeping, it’s wanting people to be able to quickly ramp up to whatever quirks the environment has, without needing to learn fundamentals of the craft first.
- mikrotikker 2y agoUnless I'm brown or gay; then you're a homophobic racist gatekeeper.