4 ms·

I don't know what to say. People keep saying these engineers exist and here I am not having seen a single, and I follow many indie hackers communities.

dwedge 6mo ago
A devops coworker found my blog and asked me how I host it, is it Kubernetes. I told him it's a dedicated server and he seemed amazed. And this was just a blog. It's real
- InfraScaler 6mo ago
  Does your coworker run a blog on k8s?
  - dwedge 6mo ago
    None of them self host anything at all. It's like that skill was totally skipped. But they advise and consult on infra
    - Hnrobert42 6mo ago
      Well, by the time you are hiring a dedicated infra role, you should be past the single VPS stage.
      - dwedge 6mo ago
        My point is that none of these coworkers have ever been at that stage. He was surprised about me hosting something because he seems to think hosting is expensive and for companies. Straight in at the top end of k8s and microservices
        wookmaster 6mo ago
        There's plenty of people that got a CS degree and went to work and this is only a job for them, they have no interest outside of work. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people so I get off work troubleshooting issues to troubleshoot issues at home lol though there aren't that many just my choice to self host cameras through HomeKit sometimes falls apart somehow but im also squeezing every KB or RAM out of that beelink I can.
        dwedge 6mo ago
        Don't get me wrong I don't think a homelab is necessary, but I think people who have only done this in a big corporate environment are doing themselves a disservice - either a small company or a homelab can fix that itch, but like you say a lot of people don't have the interest
        ryandrake 6mo ago
        It's like a developer who went straight from knowing nothing about programming to JavaScript and never looked back. They missed C, they missed assembly, they missed cycle counting, they missed knowing what your memory footprint is at all times in your application, they missed keeping your inner loops tight and in the cache... It's not just "oh this person doesn't have a nerdy hobby." These are real skill holes in [many] developers' backgrounds, just like knowing how to host something on bare metal+OS is a real skill hole for some devops people.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
- manquer 6mo ago
  I heard the same story many times before. Devops engineers did not know 101 of cable management or what even a cage nut is and being amazed to see a small office running 3 used dell servers bought dirt cheap, and shocked when it sounded like a air raid when they booted up, thought hot swapping was just magic. It is always the case - earlier in the 80s-90s programmers were shaking their heads when people stopped learning assembly and trusted the compilers fully This is nothing and hardly is shocking? new skills are learnt only if valuable otherwise one layer below seems like magic.
Dumbledumb 6mo ago
Because I think precisely the indie hacker community is not as keen to default to the big-tech stacks, because those are neither indie, nor hack-y :)
- InfraScaler 6mo ago
  Then who and in which scenarios?
deaux 6mo ago
I've worked at a startup that could've trivially ran on a single VPS and kept things simple yet had a dedicated infra guy using a full k8s setup.
- skeeter2020 6mo ago
  hey - devs aren' the only ones who fall in the premature optimization trap! Everyone from the CTO envisioning the scale of their future startup down to the IT intern is influenced by this, plus it's in the best interest of a dedicated infra guy to have a lot of dedicated infra. If you don't manage people K8s can become your kingdom and the size a badge of importance.
  - deaux 6mo ago
    In this case I think it was a bit of CTO envisioning scale, then a bit of CTO genuinely overestimating what is needed, plus a good amount of CTO just being the average nerdy dev who likes the idea of shiny toys and cool sounding stuff - "we're running on k8s!". A year or so after I left they ran out of money. They would've lasted longer if the infra guy would've just stayed the backend guy and helped get projects done more quickly instead of shiny k8s setups for projects with a dozen end-users per day. Recently I saw that the CTO has started a new startup - and ironically the only guy who he took with him onto the new team looks to have been the infra guy! I don't blame infra guy, he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing.
- InfraScaler 6mo ago
  How else are you going to put k8s on your CV? :-P
- Zetaphor 6mo ago
  I once interviewed for a small print shop that was proudly throwing out every AWS product name when describing their stack. They serve a few hundred customers and their previous system worked for decades entirely over email and a web form. I decided I wasn't interested around the point where he explained how they're migrating to lambdas

dwedge 6mo ago

A devops coworker found my blog and asked me how I host it, is it Kubernetes. I told him it's a dedicated server and he seemed amazed. And this was just a blog. It's real

InfraScaler 6mo ago
Does your coworker run a blog on k8s?
- dwedge 6mo ago
  None of them self host anything at all. It's like that skill was totally skipped. But they advise and consult on infra
  - Hnrobert42 6mo ago
    Well, by the time you are hiring a dedicated infra role, you should be past the single VPS stage.
    - dwedge 6mo ago
      My point is that none of these coworkers have ever been at that stage. He was surprised about me hosting something because he seems to think hosting is expensive and for companies. Straight in at the top end of k8s and microservices
      - wookmaster 6mo ago
        There's plenty of people that got a CS degree and went to work and this is only a job for them, they have no interest outside of work. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people so I get off work troubleshooting issues to troubleshoot issues at home lol though there aren't that many just my choice to self host cameras through HomeKit sometimes falls apart somehow but im also squeezing every KB or RAM out of that beelink I can.
        dwedge 6mo ago
        Don't get me wrong I don't think a homelab is necessary, but I think people who have only done this in a big corporate environment are doing themselves a disservice - either a small company or a homelab can fix that itch, but like you say a lot of people don't have the interest
        ryandrake 6mo ago
        It's like a developer who went straight from knowing nothing about programming to JavaScript and never looked back. They missed C, they missed assembly, they missed cycle counting, they missed knowing what your memory footprint is at all times in your application, they missed keeping your inner loops tight and in the cache... It's not just "oh this person doesn't have a nerdy hobby." These are real skill holes in [many] developers' backgrounds, just like knowing how to host something on bare metal+OS is a real skill hole for some devops people.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
manquer 6mo ago
I heard the same story many times before. Devops engineers did not know 101 of cable management or what even a cage nut is and being amazed to see a small office running 3 used dell servers bought dirt cheap, and shocked when it sounded like a air raid when they booted up, thought hot swapping was just magic. It is always the case - earlier in the 80s-90s programmers were shaking their heads when people stopped learning assembly and trusted the compilers fully This is nothing and hardly is shocking? new skills are learnt only if valuable otherwise one layer below seems like magic.

Dumbledumb 6mo ago

Because I think precisely the indie hacker community is not as keen to default to the big-tech stacks, because those are neither indie, nor hack-y :)

InfraScaler 6mo ago
Then who and in which scenarios?

deaux 6mo ago

I've worked at a startup that could've trivially ran on a single VPS and kept things simple yet had a dedicated infra guy using a full k8s setup.

skeeter2020 6mo ago
hey - devs aren' the only ones who fall in the premature optimization trap! Everyone from the CTO envisioning the scale of their future startup down to the IT intern is influenced by this, plus it's in the best interest of a dedicated infra guy to have a lot of dedicated infra. If you don't manage people K8s can become your kingdom and the size a badge of importance.
- deaux 6mo ago
  In this case I think it was a bit of CTO envisioning scale, then a bit of CTO genuinely overestimating what is needed, plus a good amount of CTO just being the average nerdy dev who likes the idea of shiny toys and cool sounding stuff - "we're running on k8s!". A year or so after I left they ran out of money. They would've lasted longer if the infra guy would've just stayed the backend guy and helped get projects done more quickly instead of shiny k8s setups for projects with a dozen end-users per day. Recently I saw that the CTO has started a new startup - and ironically the only guy who he took with him onto the new team looks to have been the infra guy! I don't blame infra guy, he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing.
InfraScaler 6mo ago
How else are you going to put k8s on your CV? :-P
Zetaphor 6mo ago
I once interviewed for a small print shop that was proudly throwing out every AWS product name when describing their stack. They serve a few hundred customers and their previous system worked for decades entirely over email and a web form. I decided I wasn't interested around the point where he explained how they're migrating to lambdas