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Comment by lgunsch | Hacker News Reader

That type of viewpoint is hurting our industry. Just blindly doing things is not productive at all. You should learn and understand what it is you are doing before you do it. Just getting shit tonnes of stuff done is not productive at all if you don't understand how or why you are doing it.

Truck drivers actually know how to drive, Crane operators know how to run a crane, and people operating production servers costing businesses time and resources should also act in the best interest of the business.

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As another counterpoint, my small business that runs full-stack in AWS and FreeBSD - I am most certainly not perfectly educated in server and network management, and actually excel in software engineering as opposed to server management and configuration.

AWS lets me get shit done. I know enough to get several services running on an EC2 server, and I don't have close to the $100k+ required to hire an excellent network engineer.

That's part of why AWS, GCE, and DO (and their contemporaries) exist. I'm more educated than most at this point, but that's only because of doing when necessary to get things done.

I wasn't trying to imply a person needs to have the entire set of domain knowledge before operating a server, but simply researching about what you are attempting to do before just copy-pasting bash lines into your terminal and not even recognizing how it even works at all.

AWS lets you not have to know a great deal about setting up servers and networks, which is great, because they are very skilled at it when they set it up for you. Then, all you need to research is what you need to do/use to deploy your apps.

Well, being an engineer at a company that provides private cloud services and a long-time programmer, I'd wait to ensure that application stays secure before singing the praises of easy.

While I agree that making things more accessible is great, "really understanding the network" and "security" are more important than ever. The types of things happening now are similar to 15 years ago when "developers" were making Access databases that are still around today and are all sorts of a mess. I've seen companies dump tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to keep them going.

Now, something similar is happening but it's with web-based applications. Much more exposed. If you don't know your stuff you, your company, or most importantly, your customers will eventually get burned.

As a counterpoint. Truck drivers don't need to know how to build a truck nor to crane operators need technical understanding of the materials in the crane's structure.

Yes, but I was talking about its usage, not it's construction. Most of the users of FreeBSD know how to operate it, but may not understand OS theory about how the kernel and userland work together.

Understanding everything beforehand is not what I was attempting to communicate, but simply researching and understanding why a stack overflow comment is the answer, before just copy-pasting it into the terminal. Like reading the man pages of the commands to be run before running them.

Crane operators do need to know a lot more than just pushing buttons. If not, cranes tip over, get blown over, and sometimes people die. I've seen it happen.

Truck drivers, not so much. Although, when your truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard and you have a load where you get paid based on timely delivery, I'd bet having some knowledge on the truck's internals would be helpful.

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