Comment by sofaofthedamned | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sofaofthedamned | Hacker News Reader

sofaofthedamned

I love this sort of post, and it makes me miss programming (i'm a Linux sysadmin type now)

The golden age of this stuff was when I was writing stuff for the Atari ST and Amiga. Fixed hardware, manuals that came with assembly instructions and timings, etc.

My greatest moment was when rewriting the Atari ST text output function. For those that don't remember, the ST had an interleaved bitmap [1] and no hardware blitter support, so everything was done with the CPU. Therefore writing text on the screen was hard. I wrote a program that speeded up the C code from the OS about 3x, then Darek Mihocka with Quick ST [2] beat my speedup. I was absolutely aggrieved about this, but spent weeks working out how he did it without any luck.

In the end the solution came to me genuinely when I was dreaming - the Motorola 68000 move.p instruction which worked quite well with the interlaced bitmap. It gave me a nearly 2x speedup and the rest of the optimisations I had meant I beat his code.

I do miss those days of a level playing field where the outcome was the result of your skills, rather than quibbling over the middleware, OS, graphics driver version used, etc etc.

[1] http://codetapper.com/amiga/maptapper/documentation/gfx/gfx-...

[2] http://www.atariuptodate.de/en/3907/quick-st

How is that working out for you? Isn't the pay significantly less being a sysadmin?

It's illusory to think that we have a choice. It's hard to avoid becoming obsolete over a long timespan.

I am a bit confused about what you are referring to. Are you saying that we do not have many choices when it comes to work? I am about to graduate, but a lot of people seem to be saying that once you gain experience it is easy to hop to different jobs.

After a while you get pigeonholed. You can hop jobs easily but it is the same shit, different name on the building. It is often easier to pivot inside a company then jump to a new company.

Personally I would appreciate when those who got pigeonholed into finding their consecutive jobs "the same sh*t" don't foreshadow that onto those yet to graduate. It's good that those coming into the job market newly know what to look out for, but the opportunities mentioned by the previous poster also mean that you can steer away from such shotty (I'm going with the auto-complete here) jobs... if you choose so.

Agreed. I've been a sysadmin, tech support nerd, developer, architect and now product manager. With each switch the value you bring jumps.

Next switch is likely starting a business.

37 y.o., still not tired of this!

I can see how someone could get bitter if they stayed in the same role/position most of their career, but in my experience this has tended to be people with a negative outlook/attitude/chip on shoulder in general... It really is what you make of it, people are people wherever you go, some are dicks, some are not.

Just accept the reality of the game and deal with it.

You don't need to spread your aura of doom everywhere you go.

I found it pretty easy so far. But I am willing to relocate intercontinentally---so there's less pressure on me to agree to the pigeonholing anyone might want to attempt.

It is, if you avoid getting stuck in a ghetto. Mobility on your part helps, too. (Both in a metaphorical sense, but also very directly: you are obviously going to have a bigger pool of potential suitors when the world is your oyster than when you are restricting yourself to one metro area.)

It's illusory to think that we have a choice. Engineers are "dev-ops" now and sysadmins are "site reliability engineers." Everybody has to do everything.

I do hate the 'devops' prefix. It's used indeterminately by everybody unfortunately, including at a recent client that didnt have devs. It's job title inflation, a bit like calling somebody a barista because they press the coffee button.

It's great when used well. I'm a (Java) developer/architect type, but being involved more in infrastructure and deployments makes me a better overall contributor. If I follow your reasoning, my job would have been "deflated", but it doesn't feel that way.

I disagree with this sentiment.

>Everybody has to do everything.

Everybody needs to have _at least some degree of familiarity_ with everything, yes. But that has always been the case. There is not and there never has been a job posting for someone to design algorithms and do nothing else, nor to deploy HTTP servers and nothing else.

I expect that if you pick any part of any software/hardware stack, anyone with a reasonable amount of experience would be able to give real-world examples where familiarity with several (and sometimes all) other parts of that stack are not only beneficial but sometimes necessary. I also expect that illustrations would be able to found from any point in the history of computing, up to and including now.

I'm going to define "long timespan" as being ~40 years (roughly how long the boomers expected to work for)

I don't think it's "hard" per se, but it does require intentional effort. I can also see how, with a difficult work schedule, or family commitments, it may become hard or even impossible to carve out the time.

I'm about 23 years into this journey, and although I still remember plenty of esoteric trivia that was useful programming in the 90's, and is useless now, there still appears to be room to learn new things every day

No, it's better. I basically got burned out writing the same code for 5 different financial companies so tried something new. Loved Linux, loved the CLI, loved the power it gave me. I've literally saved a startup when paged in a nightclub at 3am and having to type very carefully to fix their database replication.

You need to pivot in work, especially as most of us will be working for 40 years+. I'm getting into the security stuff now, which I think is the new hotness.Only thing bringing me back to programming is golang which is absolutely superb for server-side stuff.

I always seem to end up in sysadmin work. I guess I'm good at it. If you're smart and can use tools to your advantage you can create great value. Using ansible and judicious scripting I can do the work that used to take half a dozen sysadmins who just ploded through repetitive work over and over manually. That's a good argument to get a nice salary.

Hmm... I was asking because I am about to graduate in CS. But I think I like Sysadmin stuff more.

Continue with your CS degree. In my experience, all good sysadmins have significant development experience. This is especially useful when working at small companies/startups.

Yes. I can always change to sysadmin later on or just do both at once in a way.

I'd like to counter (but not disagree) with: in my experience, all good developers have significant sysadmin experience, whether professionally or self-taught.

As a tech lead of a team that is largely junior, I keep running into places where a lack of sysadmin-type knowledge seriously harms the ability of a CS degree holder (anywhere from BSc to PhD) to do real-world software engineering work unless they have either been self-taught in sysadmin sort of things or have had a couple years experience that has forced that sort of experience on them.

To give an example, a fresh-out-of-school CS degree holder that never played with Linux servers for fun in his own time might be able to implement some software and then easily learn to Dockerize it, but may be stuck for three days on getting it to talk to other services both locally and in a test environment because of essentially zero exposure to ideas in networking - and yet the fix to the problem takes about 5 minutes for someone with exposure to how networking works. ("What's a bridge?")

Another example comes from general familiarity with the server/client model: the rule of thumb to have a max number of worker threads equal to twice the cores available unless there is a reason to re-evaluate that.

All that said, I would still favor sticking with the CS degree as well. Basic practical familiarity with sysadmin concerns can be more or less picked up over time via personal projects and then as needed on the job, but the formal knowledge accumulated over a CS degree would be much harder to do that with. I would only suggest to make sure to spend time on personal projects that, for lack of a better term, are full-stack.

I'm a greaat developer, but a terrible sysadmin. I just don't have the mentality for it. I can pick up pieces, and I know the hardware, but I'll never me a good sysadmin. I have a lot of unix experience, but setting up my own laptop is always a beast of effort. I don't want to ever setup a continuous integration systems with source repo. I'll make a mess of it.

However, if you haven't had networking experience in college, you went to a terrible program. I had exposure to networking (at Cal) in 3-4 classes.

If you can program well, and like some aspects of sysadmin-ing, then becoming a Site Reliability Engineer (at eg Google) might be for you. There are always looking for people.

(I used to work as an SRE, before I made my way back into functional programming and finance recently.)

Thanks. I'll look into that.

Depends on where you work, and whether the company recognises the complexity of the work, and the value sysadmins provide.

I make as much as my developer counterparts, for what it's worth.

Devops right now is very lucrative. Those that understand the cloud (AWS/GCE) and the tools (Terraform/CloudFormation/Ansible/Kub/ECS/etc...) are extremely sought after.

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