| I'm a young-ish (late 20s) sysadmin and I've been reflecting on how I'm becoming increasingly cynical and resistant to change over time. I will probably organize my thoughts at some point, but here are some unsorted ones: * Infrastructure is often untestable. I've been bitten by the silliest changes in unexpected ways. We use IaC extensively, which makes things more organized and easier to operate, but still, testing stuff is insanely hard and time consuming, often impossible. * Infrastructure is often thightly coupled. Many architectural decisions will come back to haunt you in the future, in very serious and unexpected ways. * Infrastructure is often shared. Consequently, balancing requirements from different teams with different goals is very hard. * Often, I have no skin in the game. I will not earn more money to implement changes that will benefit my peers, but my life will suck more if I do. Often, being a intransigent bureaucrat is the most rational path I can take. * Often, devs have no skin in the game. They will earn more money if features get delivered, but won't have to deal with the long term operational and security consequences of the changes they ask for. That was already repeated ad nauseam by others, but my best professional experiences were: * The times I was responsible for software and infrastructure of a project. * The times I was working in a small team, very close to devs and thinking about a single project. |