Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

It is so normal for sysadmins. Not for developers. Maybe it's more normal now, but that's a recent development.

(These days, I hope I can just develop my super fancy Emacs config in one place, and use TRAMP to work with remote machines through an environment customized for me.)

View on HN

Some people think we don't need sysadmins nowadays. It's all in the cloud nowadays so we only need developers and some of them can do devops. Then you end up with systems where people all log into the same user with a shared SSH key, who has sudo root access, and access everything by IP address because who needs DNS, where there's no automated or regular patching because we just roll a new release with a new systems image because everything is ephemeral, or I mean will be ephemeral when we are done with it and in the mean time perhaps someone will run ansible on it again if they are brave since no one has run it again since system build. Oh and we are on call because we get outages since the disk space fills up since who needs to monitor and automatically manage that sort of thing if we never use persistent storage.

Fun fact: This depicts word for word my previous job (company size around 50 people)

Too real.

>shared SSH key

Wait, you use keys? Wow, man. I prefer good old-fashioned passwords, the same one on all servers, of course. And keep it memorable.

I'm sorry those guys don't know how to build a working system...

Throughout my career in dev I have always had to have a presence on sometimes dozens of servers. If something can't be fully customized in a few keystrokes it is not worth the effort, especially if whatever is being customized gets thrown away.

You'd be surprised how different dev careers can be.

In Windows land it's quite frequent that the dev never leaves Visual Studio. In Eclipse/Java land something similar, even though often the deployments would be on Linux, for cost saving reasons, the devs would all be on Windows.

I should write a blog post or something at some point about the differences in dev careers. Enterprise software development is very different from embedded software development which is different from web development for the mass market which is different from mobile development, etc.

Link it here

I would look forward to your blog post! Seems an interesting topic.

And then those Java developers have to try to interface their code to Jenkins to get it to do CI, and the sysadmins have to deal with the Java guys who just click on the "Run" button in Eclipse and don't know basic things like what directory the code needs to execute from.

Don't get me wrong, those Java developers can be great guys, but when the GUI-only people have to interact with the CLI for the first time, all sorts of problems can manifest themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com