The problem is when hardened system administrators and DBAs were replaced by people who were certainly not worthy successors. As that transition took place, a lot of the added value was eliminated.
A lot of those guys just couldn’t handle a reality where they couldn’t name all their systems with cute Dr Who hostnames and do all their work as local root with riced out bash prompts
Devops at least forced them to the same table with the dev org, and if they ended up getting replaced in the transition then I shed zero tears
God riddance to those guys. They thrived in silos.
They are not worried about understanding what they do, or improving their practices, they are worried about status and how others perceive them.
Those people may be able to protect their status in the short term, maybe even bluff and be promoted. But they will never truly understand what's going on.
Worked with so many of these guys. They really are the worst.
I miss the days of having an expert sys admin and DBA to help with tough issues. Now we're all on our own with no training. Most of the good people got axed or thrown into other roles. Becoming good at something only to have it thrown away and undervalued pisses me off.
I brought CI/CD, automated deployments, and infra tests with me to what was a very "retro" non-cloud UNIX style environment. I left all the horseshit (kanban, retrospectives, scrum) for the others that are not really all that interested in actually getting shit done. While those guys had a bunch of shiny tools to play with all day long, they lacked basic UNIX skills that us old guys have, and you had to continually had to show them how it was done.
The results speak for themselves. Couldn't be happier (or more securely employed) at this stage of my life.
A person who competently knows all those topics _and_ how to write application code is worth their weight in gold
IFF the company consistently values those skills. IME, they’ll say upon interviewing or hiring that those aren’t necessary for their workload, until they suddenly are, where you’re lauded as a hero. Predictably, the memory of hero status fades when promo season comes around, because those “aren’t core skillsets,” or something similar.
Exactly what I'm going through right now with a potential PIP. Last year I was told there was a solid basis for me being the getting the highest rating, but only if my core work was faster. Now they want to PIP me like nothing else I contribute to matters.
“We’ve written down objective guidelines for what constitutes your relative performance.”
“Great, looks like I’m a shoe-in.”
“Well… there are intangibles.”
“Then why have the rubric?”
Bash alone has a million footguns. If you know to use shellcheck you can probably survive those, and if you read the bash manual in its entirety you’ll almost certainly be well on your way to greatness, but getting devs to read docs – let alone boring, Web1.0 docs, is stretch.
> basics of SQL…
Have you seen the knobs Postgres and MySQL have to turn? Do you know what they all do, when you should turn them, and by how much?
The documentation for both of these is enormous and highly detailed, yet in no way covers everything that can and will go wrong. You only find those things out by using it day in and day out.
As to SQL itself, “I can do inner joins” is about as complex as I’ve seen most devs do. Hell, mention a semijoin and you’ll get blank stares.
I think in general, you’re grossly overestimating the average developer’s knowledge breadth and desire to learn these things. They simply do not matter for most, because tooling exists such that most of the time, they don’t need to know. I consider myself decent at Linux and RDBMS, but that’s mostly because I genuinely enjoy both, play with them in my off-time, and have been running Linux in some form or fashion for the last 20+ years. Also, of course, my work specializations (SRE —> DBRE) have helped.