Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

Okay, first off, being a sysadmin or an ops person is important! You are the first line of defense, and many times, companies just need eyes on systems (all the time). It's your ability to analyze a problem that makes you useful. There are ALWAYS boring repetitive service tasks that aren't rewarded but someone needs to do (this is true for devs too). Most of this probably doesn't seem hard or new to you, but I just want to say that even non-programmers are very important to any org.

Okay, now to the coding part.

"Has anyone had a similar experience and managed to push through the mental blocks associated with learning to program while having your own mind constantly working against you?"

All the time. I have the depression, and a few other mental problems most likely, and I have to say, for as much as my brain helps me it hurts me a lot too. Especially with programming and engineering, I feel like things are impossible right up until there's some breakthrough, and then things are fine. It happens really quickly, and soon you're just onto the next problem - many times I feel I don't relish the victory of whatever I have solved enough before moving onto the next thing. You might be doing the same thing too - I can't tell how much or little progress you've made, but learning is hard, and it makes everyone feel dumb, not just you.

"I can manage to throw together bash scripts and other glue that's necessary to make automation tasks function at my work, but these are largely cargo culted from various stack overflow posts or other online resources" This is more of the job than you'd think. I honestly think you're on the right track here.

As a sysadmin, are you good at debugging other people's code when something breaks (do you try? sometimes there's org boundaries that prevent this)? That is also a hugely valuable skill. I know some people who are frightened of writing code fresh, but are great at finding and fixing bugs.

I'm not sure this will be of much help, but I also think as a society we're all about fixing our problems rather than leveraging our strengths. If coding just doesn't click with you, that's fine, obviously other tech things do click with you. Keep working on finding what works for you.

"Okay, first off, being a sysadmin or an ops person is important!"

This is the first time that I have heard or read anyone say this in years. Thanks

Sysadmins are important for sure! I do think that it is true though that certain functions are being more automated. Perhaps a DevOps or SRE role might be a better fit that a full on developer? DevOps and SRE roles are certainly not going anywhere anytime soon.

Best of luck with you endeavors, my sympathy for your struggles.

As a fellow sysadmin, I think you have to be careful not to take certain concepts from HN too seriously. A lot of the HN crowd does seem to act like there is no role for sysadmins in the future, that developers will manage the infrastructure for their own software.

...This is bull----, and it probably always will be. There is a vastly higher demand for implementation and support and security than there will ever be for people to create the stuff in the first place. While learning to code is a big plus (I am a hobbyist developer when my caffeine is flowing enough for me to process code), there will always be a huge need for people who understand the priorities and needs of the companies they work for who can recommend, assemble, and manage solutions for them. Even in a fully cloud-based setup, your average company will still need someone who understands the cloud and the applications operating on it to support them and ensure they aren't being taken advantage of.

Sure, plenty of IT jobs are getting shuffled off to blue collar outsourcing shops, but check out stories about Wipro this week to understand why that is going to backfire significantly in the long run. Our job is not just to make it work, but to anticipate problems and provide affordable, workable solutions that mitigate the risks of those we work for.

To quote the wise boxer Tyson: "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face". The same applies to any type of system/proceeds. Someone above correctly mentioned '1st line of defence'. I will add to the 'cloud does everything' comment that 'cloud is a computer somewhere else'. And THAT computer (somewhere else) needs sysadmins, netadmins, DBAs, and a bunch of other xyzadmins to get shit done and fix the many small cracks before they become big cracks. A company can automate all the way to 11, but you simply cannot remove the sysadmins completely for the equation (one does not simply walk into Mordor!). Machines don't do things by themselves. Skynet is not imminent.

Thanks indeed, wish our managers knew this too. Instead of saying "What is he doing for work?!" every day.

After having gone from a 3-person company to 30+ people running two large websites serving tens of millions of visitors every month with tons of systems I can definitely say: all praise the sysadmins / devops people. Keeping the whole damn thing running was a challenge and when we finally made some good hires in this area a ton of weight was lifted off my shoulders.

Thank you!!

Thanks for the response.

As far as debugging other people's work, I do that a fair bit within our configuration management system. I also write "fresh" config management states (we use SaltStack), fairly often as well. But SaltStack is mostly human-readable YAML/Jinja, so it doesn't seem to cause the same issues as trying to write and parse Python.

Did you try to learn python following a good course that people recommend? I always find it leaps and bounds smoother and easier to learn from a structured course. Try Udacity or Coursera.

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