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0 pointsicedchai3y ago0 comments

I'm sure we all had different experiences with old school sysadmins. The ones I'm familiar with (early 90's, ISP industry) could do shell scripting and some perl. C was way out of their skill sets, except for a bit of copy-and-paste.

The people who wrote tools like terraform and ansible were engineers with system administration skills. Those are very rare.

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dijit3y ago

I’m biased. I worked in teams with such people basically my whole career.

The pay increased, the titles and tools changed but the mentality didn’t.

People just started beating their chest about devops and pooping on the legacy of sysadmins which is what most devops/SRE are.

Sounds like they were automating though.

“Cattle not pets” was a sysadmin mantra, but the business wanted pets most of the time.

icedchaiOP3y ago

There was certainly some automation being done by the sysadmins I was familiar with (I did say "relatively little" in my original post, meaning compared to today!) It was definitely more pets than cattle at the places I was familiar with. These were small-ish companies, and the business didn't care as long as the systems worked.

dijit3y ago

Sounds like a “devops” in that same position would be doing the same then.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsicedchai3y ago0 comments

The people who wrote tools like terraform and ansible were engineers with system administration skills. Those are very rare.

0 comments

dijit3y ago

I’m biased. I worked in teams with such people basically my whole career.

The pay increased, the titles and tools changed but the mentality didn’t.

People just started beating their chest about devops and pooping on the legacy of sysadmins which is what most devops/SRE are.

Sounds like they were automating though.

“Cattle not pets” was a sysadmin mantra, but the business wanted pets most of the time.

icedchaiOP3y ago

dijit3y ago

Sounds like a “devops” in that same position would be doing the same then.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse