One of the best-oiled teams I was in had devs and sysadmins work together closely. If Jim made a huge Python mess out of its small throwaway project (that the CEO needed because he wanted a nice chart for an investor meeting) that required several virtual environments and a particular (older) version of something then the sysadmin had the power to call him out and question his methods. While not many programmers appreciate that, those that do make for a more positive workplace IMO.

RE: idempotency / immutability in general, I heard about Nix many times but I have been put off every time I tried it: cutesy (and rather dumb) terminology like pills and flakes and such, a Haskell dialect the world really did not need, tight binding between things (forgot which at this point, sorry), and the list kept growing until I just gave up. With all their quirkiness and edge cases my scripts still beat the pants off of Nix for my own goals. I mean, pacman/yay have a flag that says "only install this package if not already installed" so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But I really do want something like Nix (and no, not Guix either). Not only for packages -- for the entire system. I want to be able to plug an USB drive and issue a command that says "show me new devices plugged in the last 5 minutes, or last time I checked".

We don't have stuff like that. Or if we do, I am blissfully unaware of it. Can't we just start writing them and push their adoption? Every sysadmin team invents magic from scratch. Surely we can and should collectively do better...