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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

"it implies that sysadmins never used to code either"

It does, but to be honest, when I studied computer science "not coding" was a big deal.

There were many people who simply didn't like to do it for whatever reason, and those weren't "theory people". There were meetups on how to structure your studies so you would get your degree with at least code to write as possible, and most of those people focused on getting jobs in operations later.

For some of them DevOps was cool, because it finally allowed them to learn to code in an area they were interested in, but for others it meant their low-code jobs transformed to developer jobs over time, which they didn't like at all.

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For sure, there are people people who don’t like to code but they should not really have entered a computing discipline.

I was intimidated when I learned but that was a little bit because my first language book was COBOL and I didn’t even have a working compiler.

The “good” sysadmins I learned from were all able to code, in fact many of them used to be developers themselves.

Yes, I think your first language is a big deal.

And not just because of the language features, but also because of the community around it.

JavaScript isn't pretty, but it has a big community.

The Rust community today might be more helpful than the C/C++ community back in the days, so learning Rust might still be easier than an easier language.

I started with C and Java which I both didn't like much, but learning to code was a big wish for me as long as I know computers exist, so I worked through the problems.

I've been writing software since I was about 10, and a sysadmin/systems engineer for almost 30 years now. You could be very successful with the right mindset, understanding of process and deep-knowledge of operating systems, networking, file systems and dns.

A good friend of mine suffers dyslexia and dyscalcula, and was just never able to jump past the standard unix shell scripting skillset, not for lack of trying. His understanding of Unix internals, TCP/IP, DNS and TQM-oriented process development is mind-blowing.

He just retired from a successful, 30 year career architecting and implementing secure messaging systems for several large banks. If you bank with Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Wachovia then you've probably communicated with your bank through systems he built.

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