[gaius]

Yes, the devops movement is silly. In the 90s when I started, every SA knew, and used, Perl and C in their daily jobs.

Then dotcom happened and every kid with a Linux box in their bedroom put themselves about as a SA. And in the 10s people think SAs who code is an amazing new invention.

And back in the 60s, IBM had "systems programmers"... Same thing.

[acdha]

You're leaving out the other 80% of the industry – yes, IBM shops had systems programmers but every single one of them also had operators who were following a big run-book of canned procedures and diagnostic trees which sometimes ended with “Call <sysprog>”. Most Unix shops I've seen had a few decent developers and a bunch of people who used tools written by the first group.

The big difference I see in devops is that people started taking system management seriously enough to do first-class development rather than an afterthought.

[area51org]

It wasn't really that clear-cut. I started in Ops in the '90s, too, in SV, and there were plenty of SAs I knew who were proud of the fact that they weren't coders. Yes, they knew the shell, and maybe they knew a tiny bit of Perl. But as a guy who was an SA and a coder (Perl, C) I was a rarity.

I still am, but the "DevOps Movement" is here to point out that this artificial dichotomy is considered harmful.

[kokey]

Back in the early to mid 90s most Unix sysadmins I knew started out as computer science students, so they could code (the most practical language being C) but ended up coding less over time.