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It doesn’t mean anything for two reasons: companies have treated it as a catch—all, and there is a glut of people calling themselves SREs who have never operate

It doesn’t mean anything for two reasons: companies have treated it as a catch—all, and there is a glut of people calling themselves SREs who have never operated a server that wasn’t in a cloud. You can learn enough about Linux to be decent at your job on only VMs if you’re dedicated, but I’d argue that until you’ve also dealt with hypervisors, bare metal, and hardware issues, you’re missing some of the picture. “That’s no longer applicable, so why should I care?” Because it pops up everywhere I’ve been. Random build server that everyone forgot about but is critical suddenly shits itself, it’s running some ancient version of Ubuntu, and it’s all hand-rolled. Someone decided to provision a bunch of EC2s with bash, but they made critical errors like not knowing to make a new initramfs after configuring mdadm, so now the RAID disappears on reboots. Understanding the fundamentals has always and will always matter. Anyone telling you differently is selling you something.

playingalong 2y ago
> people calling themselves SREs who have never operated a server that wasn’t in a cloud Wait. Since when this is a requirement?
- sgarland 2y ago
  Because if you’ve never touched hardware, you haven’t seen the full gamut of what can go wrong. I don’t think everyone needs a rack in their house, but you can buy old tower servers for dirt cheap, and learn stuff. In my career so far, the best Ops-adjacent people all had homelabs. I view it as a huge green flag if you have one. Not necessarily a red flag if you don’t, but it warrants some more questions. That’s not to say “I have a server” means you’re great; you could just be running Plex with nothing in IaC, no config management, no monitoring, etc.
  - timacles 2y ago
    Listen man, you’re not wrong, but you’re also Living in the past. It’s no different from saying a real programmer does low level C coding. The field has changed, everything is in the cloud. Yeah most engineers can’t troubleshoot low level stuff, but they rarely Need to. There’s no need to be grumpy about it and just accept their jobs are mainly configuring abstractions rather than being some bare metal guru who knows kernel intricacies. I work with like 15 ops/system engineers. None of them know anything about cpu schedulers and raid arrays. We’re just old man
    - sgarland 2y ago
      I’m in my 30s; is that now old? > no need to be grumpy about it Counterpoint: I know both cloud and metal. It can be done, you just have to care enough to learn. That’s my bugbear: people by and large aren’t learning things for the sake of learning, they’re just learning what they need for the role.

playingalong 2y ago

> people calling themselves SREs who have never operated a server that wasn’t in a cloud Wait. Since when this is a requirement?

sgarland 2y ago
Because if you’ve never touched hardware, you haven’t seen the full gamut of what can go wrong. I don’t think everyone needs a rack in their house, but you can buy old tower servers for dirt cheap, and learn stuff. In my career so far, the best Ops-adjacent people all had homelabs. I view it as a huge green flag if you have one. Not necessarily a red flag if you don’t, but it warrants some more questions. That’s not to say “I have a server” means you’re great; you could just be running Plex with nothing in IaC, no config management, no monitoring, etc.
- timacles 2y ago
  Listen man, you’re not wrong, but you’re also Living in the past. It’s no different from saying a real programmer does low level C coding. The field has changed, everything is in the cloud. Yeah most engineers can’t troubleshoot low level stuff, but they rarely Need to. There’s no need to be grumpy about it and just accept their jobs are mainly configuring abstractions rather than being some bare metal guru who knows kernel intricacies. I work with like 15 ops/system engineers. None of them know anything about cpu schedulers and raid arrays. We’re just old man
  - sgarland 2y ago
    I’m in my 30s; is that now old? > no need to be grumpy about it Counterpoint: I know both cloud and metal. It can be done, you just have to care enough to learn. That’s my bugbear: people by and large aren’t learning things for the sake of learning, they’re just learning what they need for the role.