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by wtbob 4125 days ago
From one of the comments:

> It’s easier to train a developer to do sane operating procedures than to teach a sysadmin the developer mindset (testing, revision control, breaking down to logical units and similar).

Having done both jobs, I don't really think that's true, unless by 'sysadmin' one means the type of low-skill position which resets passwords. A system administrator is responsible for administering a system of hosts and software; his should be a more complex job than a developers. He should be responsible for test systems as well as for production systems; his scripts should live in source control. I'll grant that functional decomposition may not be as vitally important to his work as it is to a normal developers—but then, his scripts will inevitably grow to be pretty complex, so maybe it will be after all.

That doesn't mean that developers are stupid either. Sure, at BigEnterpriseCorp a developer is just a seat-warmer who implements directives like 'add a method to the Foo class which takes two arguments, adds them and returns the result,' but a real developer is a student (whether formally taught or informally self-taught) of computer science; he understands and can choose & implement both algorithms & data structures in order to solve a problem.

A good DevOps hire is going to have some skill in both areas, not as a weak sysadmin and a weak dev, but as a strong sysadmin and a strong dev. A good DevOps team is going to be more skilled (and expensive) than the equivalent dev and ops teams, but it will also be more productive and less error-prone.

If you're trying to build a devops team from Initech, Initron and Initrol low-skill employees, you're probably going to fail. If you're building a devops team to reduce costs, you're probably going to fail. But if you're building a devops team to increase profitability and competitiveness, you may succeed.
1 comments
acveilleux 4125 days ago
In the Unix/Linux world, a lot of the Sys Admins I've met have been very strong technically. Knew at least a scripting language and basic C programming. The trend however has been for less and less coding skills and more superficial. Sometimes not even any shell scripting skills.

In the Windows world, a lot of the Sys Admins do not have those skills. It's changing, things like PowerShell and various others are helping, but a lot of Windows Admin are just not that comfortable away from the GUI. I think the comment you refer to is by someone with a Windows dev background. GUIs don't version...

The mainframe world folks tended to be very silo'd (and IBM engineers were never far to hold hands.)

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