[tonyarkles]

Very very excellent points. I think that everyone on my team would be capable of learning them, but at least in this specific case it's not so much that they feel it's beneath them, but more of a fear. They talk about C as if it's something that only dark wizards understand, likely as a result of poorly taught early CS.

I think what I'm saying is that I feel like sysadmins are frequently needed for sake of expediency, especially when hiring younger developers. And maybe, due to that same bias, I actually mean "senior developers who understand abstractions several layers deep" :)

[mmt]

> I think what I'm saying is that I feel like sysadmins are frequently needed for sake of expediency, especially when hiring younger developers.

Thanks. That's a point I hadn't considered.

I'm not sure that expediency translates to a need, as such, but that situation is certainly different from the one I envisioned (where a sysadmin is merely a luxury or an optimization to the programmer-DIY-ops scenario).

> I actually mean "senior developers who understand abstractions several layers deep" :)

I'm not sure you do, since you admitted to really being at least part sysadmin, earlier :)

[tonyarkles]

> I'm not sure you do, since you admitted to really being at least part sysadmin, earlier :)

Hah!

I wish I could remember which talk it was. Bryan Cantrill had a good line about DevOps in one of his talks (I think it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE). The gist was "you can say you're DevOps, but when the shit hits the fan, you're either going to be Dev or Ops. If you're a Dev, you're going to want to debug the problem before rebooting the failed machine. If you're Ops, you're going to want to reboot the machine as fast as you can to get it back up." Through that lens, I'm definitely pretty far over on the Dev spectrum; when something goes catastrophically wrong and someone reboots a box to "solve the problem", my first reaction is "YOU FUCKER YOU BURNED THE CORPSE"

It's such a tricky thing all around. Looking back at what I wrote earlier, I also realize that in some ways I'm facilitating the ignorance. I've got a really nice Consul and Nomad setup for the team, so they can pretty much just toss .wars and Docker containers at the cluster and they'll automatically get scheduled somewhere with spare capacity. The load balancer, the database cluster, all of the service discovery and job scheduling stuff... they've never had to get in and set any of that up. Maybe it's time to do more mentoring...

Anyway, thanks for getting me thinking. I've been a little bit grouchy lately about all of the recent experiences of people not knowing how the stuff they build actually runs. You've been a great mirror for some self-reflection :)

Edit: also, bare metal rocks.