4 ms·

Since when sysadmins are engineers?

• brians 12y ago
  Who drives the train? The engineer. We've used "engineer" to refer to the person who operates a complex engine ever since Watt. The idea that engineers are planners and blueprint-drawers is more recent. I blame Kipling and the Canadians.
• zwischenzug 12y ago
  That was one of the significant discussions when planning the book: who is it aimed at? Both of us are devs by background, but in discussion it turned out we had been doing a lot of what was called "sysadmin" work as well. We both ended up doing DevOps (whatever that is), and pitched the book at mostly DevOps, then dev, then sysadmin in that order. But we don't really believe Docker is limited to one group of engineers. In a sense the semantics is irrelevant: if you're interested in software production and delivery then Docker is a tool you're going to want to know about.
• sciurus 12y ago
  All the developers started calling themselves "software engineers", and we wanted in on the fun too. ;-) More seriously, I agree the term "engineer" is problematic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer#Use_of_the_title_.22Engineer.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer#Use_of_the_t...
  • zwischenzug 12y ago
    Useful link, thanks! I'd always used "engineer" as a more generic term for someone who "got things done" related to software. To do this you'd need to have done some form of programming, but perhaps not self-identify as such.