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If you think knowing apt / vim / postgresql / bash / linux intimately is a waste of time and just a pile of Unix trivia, then you and I are entirely different t

by jgb1984 2y ago

If you think knowing apt / vim / postgresql / bash / linux intimately is a waste of time and just a pile of Unix trivia, then you and I are entirely different type of engineers / developers, I don't think we even speak the same language :) I'm actually grateful that your mindset is becoming more prevalent, as it only serves to increase the value of my own skillset.

Dalewyn 2y ago
Look at it this way: Most of us don't care how cars work, we outsource the production and maintenance because time is valuable compared to the money we spend. Time is finite and there are more things in this world than we can ever afford to care in a single lifetime, not caring is a matter of budgeting that finite time so we can live our lives in a fruitful manner.
- jgb1984 2y ago
  Again, making the false argument that instead of learning a system engineer skillset you need to learn nothing at all. As if instead of spending time on systems, everything will be magically done for you and it costs zero FTE headcount. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You spend a similar amount of time, but on different knowledge and tasks. And I'm saying I find my skillset more enjoyable and more useful compared to the vendor lock-in and Tower of cloud services of Babylon that is AWS/Azure/Google.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It only increases the value of that skillset if it's in demand. Look, I'm on your side on this, I've learned all this stuff and it'd be nice if it was in high demand. But it's just not. Most people's experience of apt-get stops at a Dockerfile, most people never learned vim and never will because they have VSCode, most people do not really know how to use bash and have never recompiled a kernel. It's a truism that you can do stuff a lot cheaper yourself if you have these skills than paying a cloud to do it for you, but cloud services have grown like crazy for over a decade now and show no sign of slowing down. UNIX is fundamentally a user-hostile operating system, it will never change, and it's nice for those of us who learned it that we can sometimes convert our rapidly-obsoleting skills into savings (sometimes), but it doesn't seem likely to stay that way. The Linux vendors just haven't improved the usability of their platform at anywhere near a fast enough pace to keep up with the cloud vendors.

Dalewyn 2y ago

Look at it this way: Most of us don't care how cars work, we outsource the production and maintenance because time is valuable compared to the money we spend. Time is finite and there are more things in this world than we can ever afford to care in a single lifetime, not caring is a matter of budgeting that finite time so we can live our lives in a fruitful manner.

jgb1984 2y ago
Again, making the false argument that instead of learning a system engineer skillset you need to learn nothing at all. As if instead of spending time on systems, everything will be magically done for you and it costs zero FTE headcount. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You spend a similar amount of time, but on different knowledge and tasks. And I'm saying I find my skillset more enjoyable and more useful compared to the vendor lock-in and Tower of cloud services of Babylon that is AWS/Azure/Google.

mike_hearn 2y ago

It only increases the value of that skillset if it's in demand. Look, I'm on your side on this, I've learned all this stuff and it'd be nice if it was in high demand. But it's just not. Most people's experience of apt-get stops at a Dockerfile, most people never learned vim and never will because they have VSCode, most people do not really know how to use bash and have never recompiled a kernel. It's a truism that you can do stuff a lot cheaper yourself if you have these skills than paying a cloud to do it for you, but cloud services have grown like crazy for over a decade now and show no sign of slowing down. UNIX is fundamentally a user-hostile operating system, it will never change, and it's nice for those of us who learned it that we can sometimes convert our rapidly-obsoleting skills into savings (sometimes), but it doesn't seem likely to stay that way. The Linux vendors just haven't improved the usability of their platform at anywhere near a fast enough pace to keep up with the cloud vendors.