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0 pointsraw_anon_11114mo ago0 comments

Smart IT people were automating things with Perl and later Powershell since I started professionally working in Windows shops in 2000.

Before that I was working on DEC VAX machines where IT was using DCL.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

k__4mo ago· 2 in thread

Yeah, but I studied with a bunch of guys who said they'd go into IT, because they hated coding.

mancerayder4mo ago

You can hate coding and be an excellent network engineer or even DBA.

I'm an infrastructure guy and I learned to code, but I don't code today. The other poster who talked about good people in the old days using Perl and suchlike tools is right. Competent people care about automation.

But there are all sorts of automation tools that don't require knowing how to write object oriented code or do a ton of code reviews. Terraform is one - it's yaml, and the complexity is one of design patterns. Another is Ansible. GitHub Actions. Many many more.

Let me throw out a grenade. Software developers often over estimate their capabilities in technology. Because a person is an expert in Ruby or Go, and on the weekend they stood up a hosted app on ECS, now magically they're geniuses and understand DevOps.

False. DevOps engineering, network engineering, DBA, and a lot of other non-developer jobs take 5-10 years to get right.

Hopefully I've slammed our Leetcode hiring practices, but really I'm just venting at this point.

raw_anon_1111OP4mo ago

It’s a red flag anytime I see a company with a dedicated “database administrator” usually they want you to put all of your business logic in stored procedures and have a dozen GetCustomer_n copies for versioning.

What can a modern operations person do that can automated anything via coding?

BTW: I am “expert” in cloud by any definition (did at a startup, worked at AWS ProServe, staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company) and I develop. How hard do you really think it is for someone with a developer mindset to learn how system design works at scale and bring their same developer mindset to infrastructure as code?

It took me exactly 2.5 years from opening the AWS console for the first time to being hired at AWS.

Everyone in my division at my current company at my level can hold their own as either a developer or a “senior cloud engineer”. We just find infrastructure babysitting incredibly boring

Half the reason I learned cloud was not because I didn’t want to manage servers - I didn’t want to deal with server administrations.

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