Re: [SAGE] Programmers as.. sysadmins..

[Neil Neely <neil@xxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 30, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Dustin Puryear 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.


I believe you are talking about "Application Programmers", and I  
expect your generalization is fairly true most of the time.  System  
programming is a very different animal and it has a lot more in  
common with System Administration than Application Programming.

In my experience the line between a great system administrator and a  
great system programmer is very blurry.  I've met plenty of good  
sysadmins who couldn't program very well - its my opinion that the  
lack of programming skill is the line that is keeping them from being  
great.  Of course there are probably exceptions I haven't met and I  
don't mean to offend anyone here, this is just a generalization.

I'm a big fan of the SAGE job description, and it has this one in it:

From Level IV: Senior System Administrator (http://www.sage.org/ 
field/jobs-descriptions.html)
* Ability to program in an administrative language (Tk, Perl,  
VBScript, a shell), to port C programs from one platform to another,  
and to write small C or C# programs.

Doesn't mean you need to be an application developer, but it really  
does mean that the skill is usually important at the top of our  
profession.


Neil Neely