Even though the blog appears to be by someone who doesn’t have much of a clue, this is gatekeeping.
Just like in the Unix world of old before the rise of open source, many system administrators never compile any binary. And that is fine.
Just like in the Unix world of old before the rise of open source, many system administrators never compile any binary. And that is fine.
Given there's always been a chronic shortage of qualified and experienced technical staff, isn't the the "real" real-world problem here the raising of the barriers-to-entry for sysadmins jobs? I think most companies would rather employ someone who can at-least try to get something done rather than having no-one at all.
One of the reasons why "the cloud" is so popular among businesses today is because it frees them up from having to run their own systems and infrastructure (who needs a *nix sysadmin when the AWS and Azure portals let you do everything through a GUI?) - whereas I'm sure many (most?) of those same businesses would honestly prefer retaining possession and sovereignty over their data and applications (especiallly latency-sensitive stuff) - and we all lament how the cloud giveth and the cloud taketh-away - but here we are.
Compiling and making versioned, packages of them (for example, in /opt/corp/prod/lang/gcc/12.3.0/... ) means that there can be a known good set of tools independent of operating system version and when the latter is upgraded, users can still build their products using the same paths and versions.
This is before the widespread use of containers, but doesn't change the advantages of having a reliable set of installed tools where users are in control of what versions they use.
Hint: Chris Siebenmann has administered closed source Unices.
Another hint: Chris Siebenmann's posts to comp.unix.wizards can still be found.
If you quote only half of the sentence, it suddenly means something else! When used to attack it’s a variation of the venerable ‘straw man’ debate technique.
Nice if Mr Siebenmann made insightful comments on a Usenet group about Unix but that doesn’t mean his comments about ARM computers are indisputable.
How about you summarize the points in the blog post that you agree with?
What the author wrote objectively demonstrates a lack of essential skills and also a lack of temperament for what could be called a sys-admin, and therefore they are ultimately disqualified.