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Re: [SAGE] Programmers as.. sysadmins..
- To: "Dustin Puryear" <dustin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Subject: Re: [SAGE] Programmers as.. sysadmins..
- From: "Dustin J. Mitchell" <dustin@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:16:29 -0500
- Cc: sage-members@xxxxxxxx
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On Jan 30, 2008 4:48 PM, Dustin Puryear <dustin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> So, my question: Have you found, in your experience, that programmers
> make bad sysadmins? I have. I'm not saying that all programmers are bad
> sysadmins, or that PAST programmers make bad CURRENT sysadmins, but that
> CURRENT programmers almost always make bad CURRENT sysadmins, even if
> small settings.
Short answer: yes. And I agree completely with your reasons. I've
been all over this particular map -- at different companies I've been
100% sysadmin, 100% programmer, and 50/50 -- so I've puzzled over this
myself for some time.
I would add, as a corollary, that sysadmins don't tend to make very
good programmers. Code from admins tends to be of the get-it-done
variety, without much concern for things like maintainability,
portability, or configurability. It cuts boths ways. Like Dustin,
I'm over-generalizing here.
ISTM that both disciplines are solving the same kinds of problems --
managing an incomprehensibly complex system through many layers of
abstraction, automation, and analysis. I think that the conflict
comes when someone in one field doesn't have the perspective to see
the problems in the other field in this light. A programmer doesn't
want to install the latest version of that package on every machine
enterprise-wide, but just on his desktop, so configure/make/make
install works fine for him. Similarly, a sysadmin doesn't need her
bash script to run under SunOS 2.7's shell, so there's no reason to
sweat shell-portability issues.
Dustin
--
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com