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Comment by craigvn | Hacker News Reader

IMO, devops is a special kind of sysadmin, one where you get rid of the sysadmin and tell the developer to do it.

Devops is a highly automated sysadmin job. When we automate something, we write code. When we write code, we want to make it maintainable, which developers are usually good at, but sysadmins are not.

Most of good devops who I worked with came to this field from development, not from sysadmin.

And yet, we don't continue calling a sysadmin turned programmer a sysadmin, so why would you insist that we call a programmer who turns sysadmin a programmer?

It doesn't really matter where they came from, or what's involved in the job, they're sys admins.

No one calls a physicist a programer because the simulation software they wrote could've been written better by a professional developer, they just call them physicists.

I think, the difference between devops and programmer is similar to the difference between a programmer in OOP and a programmer in a functional language. Or a programmer in a commonly used programming language and programmer in DSL.

I think the difference between devops and a programmer is that they're 2 different titles that describe two different responsibilities in the long term maintenance of software inside a company.

I just felt a million sysadmin voices cry out and be suddenly silenced at the thought of developers caring more about maintainability than them. Sysadmins are the ones that have to maintain all the crap that is thrown over the fence at them, whilst the developers go chase the new shiny.

I can't necessarily disagree with you, as I get older I start disliking software more and more specifically because most of it is half-done bullshit.

And I'm a software developer.

The decision making I see come out of some companies (and some people) absolutely blows me away. VS 2017 doesn't install support for MVC 4 by default, saving themselves a godly 6MB in the process... who the fuck thought that was a good idea? I found out because I installed VS 2017 and spent several hours trying to figure out why all my projects stopped working.

Or I found out today that if you try to use CPanel's automated licensing api, it won't license if the IP has previously been licensed with someone else, but has been cancelled. WHY?!?

Or SmarterMail's API's, only about half the options their documentation claims is settable is actually settable via their API. The rest just doesn't change unless you manually dive into their XML files and then reload the service. WHY?!?

People bitch about C and C++, but I personally find working in those languages less stressful because most of the time you're working at a low enough level that people aren't throwing shit over the wall at you constantly. I really really wish C++ had a better build tools story, but when it's all said and done I honestly believe the quality of the software written by C and C++ tends to be better than that written in higher level languages.

I know I'll be hung out to dry for that sentiment, and this turned a bit ranty, but after a while I just stop trusting any code that isn't my own because I know someone somewhere made a stupid fucking decision and I'm going to experience productivity loss as a result.

alright, I'm done ranting :)

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