Xenophobia and Elitism in the SysAdmin Community | Hacker News Reader

Xenophobia and Elitism in the SysAdmin Community

standalone-sysadmin.com

22 pointsMPSimmons8 comments

You'll find that a professional sysadmin (or DBA, or network engineer) is technologically conservative for the simple reason that he or she is personally responsible for uptime, and gets paged at 3am when there's a problem, and more than likely uptime is a metric that feeds into their bonus calculation.

That's not fear of change. It's the experience to step beyond the technnology and see the bigger picture. The company's systems aren't a playground, they are the machinery of production. Proven technology, even if it's "obsolete" according to the blogosphere, rules in this world. Calling such people names just betrays inexperience.

I don't understand why you think the article is against conservatism or even advocating using the latest fad. I read it as saying that Solaris sysadmins tend to disregard the tools and methods of Linux sysadmins (as a possible concrete example; I'm making it up on the spot, because the article doesn't give any concrete examples of the sort)

Agreed. Additionally, most sysadmin work in first-world countries these days is infrastructure programming - first and second line support is inevitably handled offshore.

Writing a 20 line Perl script to do 'date -I' or not wishing to learn a new language to simplify sharing of code because it's been 15 years since you last learnt a new language isn't conservatism, it's fear of the unknown.

The subject of the article was not what I expected.

You should have looked in some more dictionaries. That definition is too strict.

Merrian-Webster:

  fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything
  that is strange or foreign

Dictionary.com:

  an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers
  or of that which is foreign or strange.

Yourdictionary.com:

  fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything
  foreign or strange

Cambridge Advanced Learners dictionary:

  extreme dislike or fear of foreigners, their customs,
  their religions, etc.

No, it's just descriptivist trash and proper use of the language.

More like, should've looked it up in the dictionary and found neophobia.

Intellectual laziness is not just cause for using words improperly.

Neophobia is not the correct word to use, because it's not necessarily about new things. Not even about things new to a specific person. Some BSD admin may irrationally and violently dislike Linux variants of his tools.

It's always nice to have a proper word available, but sometimes it just doesn't exist. If you can think of a clear, succinct description to replace 'a xenophobic attitude' when you want to say someone is irrationally negative about something and you think it's because of the unfamiliarity of the thing, then I'm listening.

I get these might lead to bad things, but it is also a very useful tool - you can discard a lot of ideas this way without having to examine them in detail (which takes far too much time) and you loose very little.

As for elitism, I never had much issue with that - who would you rather get advice from - Kissinger or Sara Palin?

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