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I'm a sysadmin who used to be a coder. I know a lot of people who have gone in either direction. The reason I stopped coding is that I got into it to solve pro

I'm a sysadmin who used to be a coder. I know a lot of people who have gone in either direction. The reason I stopped coding is that I got into it to solve problems, but I got tired of spending what felt like 90% of my time writing unit tests, wrestling with frameworks, and solving problems with upgrades to the huge webs of dependencies for even basic projects. In other words, I got fed up with what coding has become. It's no longer hacking. It's toolchain management. I'd always been a full stack developer, so I just started focusing more on the sysadmin side and gradually transitioned over there. I can manage toolchains just fine if I want to focus on that. My coding experience is handy when we're trying to troubleshoot a bug that only shows up on production ... uncommon, because our dev and QA groups are GREAT, but it still happens. I not only know where all the logs are, but I'm able to read the code and make sense of stack traces from the different languages we use. Those who think what I've done is ridiculous don't understand how scripted everything that happens in the sysadmin world these days. Everything in infrastructure/operations is scripted except the troubleshooting -- and even that stuff gets scripted as soon as it's done so that it doesn't pop up again. Yes, the native language of these tasks is bash, but ruby and python are becoming really popular. So's haskell, for those who can speak it. What's disappointing me right now is that all of the chef stuff we're doing is starting to get complicated enough to have a big toolchain (thankfully managed right now with bundler) and starting to grow unit tests... Didn't I make a career change to get away from this crap? I think I'll go be a DBA next. ;)

hosh 13y ago
That's a weird association between "unit tests" and "toolchain management". Did you feel it was a tedious part of development or what?
- ams6110 13y ago
  To me, unit tests are the ultimate in tedium. I appreciate the value, but writing them is certainly about the dullest part of the job.
  - hosh 13y ago
    Thanks for the response :-) I know a fair number of developers who find ops pretty crazy, considering that a good chunk of it can be automated. So I suppose the other side of tedium is the unnecessary risk in having to hand-perform things repeatedly.
    - houk 13y ago
      there's more to ops than just deploying. it's about running a smooth environment from end to end. automation gets you 90% there and give you the time to focus on that much more involved 10%.
      - hosh 13y ago
        Fair enough. What do you think about Anderseen's "Software Eating the World?" Wouldn't it make sense that at some point in the future, "running a smooth environment" gets eaten by software too?
    - karlkatzke 13y ago
      houk got most of the answer. The other answer is that ops, unlike dev, still gets to do things the fast way if it makes sense. So if it's faster to hit up and enter a bunch of times? Do it. Dev doesn't get to make that decision most of the time these days, and that's just sad and completely against the spirit of hacking.
      - hosh 13y ago
        There's hacking, and then there's polish. You can't make a product out of a hack. Though some companies offer Hack Days to get things going.
mistermann 13y ago
> tired of spending what felt like 90% of my time writing unit tests, wrestling with frameworks, and solving problems with upgrades to the huge webs of dependencies for even basic projects. In other words, I got fed up with what coding has become. It's no longer hacking. It's toolchain management. I'd add to that, dealing with programmers who insist all of this is absolutely necessary, as if software didn't exist before these advancements. Meanwhile, it takes them a couple days to program themselves out of a wet paper bag.

hosh 13y ago

That's a weird association between "unit tests" and "toolchain management". Did you feel it was a tedious part of development or what?

ams6110 13y ago
To me, unit tests are the ultimate in tedium. I appreciate the value, but writing them is certainly about the dullest part of the job.
- hosh 13y ago
  Thanks for the response :-) I know a fair number of developers who find ops pretty crazy, considering that a good chunk of it can be automated. So I suppose the other side of tedium is the unnecessary risk in having to hand-perform things repeatedly.
  - houk 13y ago
    there's more to ops than just deploying. it's about running a smooth environment from end to end. automation gets you 90% there and give you the time to focus on that much more involved 10%.
    - hosh 13y ago
      Fair enough. What do you think about Anderseen's "Software Eating the World?" Wouldn't it make sense that at some point in the future, "running a smooth environment" gets eaten by software too?
  - karlkatzke 13y ago
    houk got most of the answer. The other answer is that ops, unlike dev, still gets to do things the fast way if it makes sense. So if it's faster to hit up and enter a bunch of times? Do it. Dev doesn't get to make that decision most of the time these days, and that's just sad and completely against the spirit of hacking.
    - hosh 13y ago
      There's hacking, and then there's polish. You can't make a product out of a hack. Though some companies offer Hack Days to get things going.

mistermann 13y ago

> tired of spending what felt like 90% of my time writing unit tests, wrestling with frameworks, and solving problems with upgrades to the huge webs of dependencies for even basic projects. In other words, I got fed up with what coding has become. It's no longer hacking. It's toolchain management. I'd add to that, dealing with programmers who insist all of this is absolutely necessary, as if software didn't exist before these advancements. Meanwhile, it takes them a couple days to program themselves out of a wet paper bag.