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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

As an OG networking person, developer, and Linux user, the state of modern dev culture just makes me sad.

Modern devs are helpless in the face of things I taught myself to do in a day or two when I was fourteen, and they’re paralyzed with terror at the thought of running something.

It’s “hard” goes the cliche. Networking is “hard.” Sys admin is “hard.” Everything is “hard” so you’d better pay an expert to do it.

Where do we get these experts? Ever wonder that?

It’s just depressing. Why even bother.

It really makes me worry about who will keep all this stuff running or build anything new in the future if we are losing not only skills but spine and curiosity. Maybe AI.

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Yes, networking and sysadmin are hard, because the Internet is a much more hostile place than it was 20 years ago and the consequences for getting things wrong are much more severe. Early 2000s, ISPs had ports open by default and getting a static IP-address was a question of just asking. With dyndns, we were hosting websites off home computers. I remember a comment on HN saying that some US university provided publicly routable static IPs to dorm room port. Not even sure I could get a static IP-address nowadays as a home consumer, never mention the willingness to host something that is not behind a WAF.

And when you got things wrong back in the day, you came home from school, saw a very weirdly behaving computer, grumbled and reinstalled the OS. Nowadays it is a very different story with potentially very severe consequences.

And this is just about getting things wrong at home, in corporate environment it is 100x more annoying. In corporate, anyway you spend 80% of the development time figuring out how to do things and then 20% on actual work, nobody will have the time to teach themselves something out of their domain.

I have 2gbps at home and open ports and IPv6. It’s a dynamic IP but it changes maybe once a year. I could host a site here, sure. It’s infinitely better than it was 20 years ago.

OSes are more secure. Isolation is better. Languages are better. Hardware is vastly cheaper and faster and more reliable. Everything is easier and faster and better.

In the corp world we have this absurd embarrassment of riches. There are like ten choices in every category. Half of it is free. It’s easier to set up and run than it was back then. Way easier. Hosting is silly cheap if you compare cost / performance.

People are just incurious and brainwashed with this weird sense of helplessness.

This security phobia is so overblown if you take some basic precautions and don’t run crap service software.

If I were hosting something controversial that might draw the ire of one of the insane political cults out there I’d run it through a free CDN maybe. That’s easy.

It doesn't matter how easy something is to set up and run from technology side if actually being able to set it up and run it takes half a year or more coordination calendar time, justification to several different departments, their review and approval. It's completely understandable, regulations and audit requirements are what they are: but then it is strange to read that modern developers somehow are paralyzed with terror. Well, the ones who were willing to try new things got shitcanned long time ago, this is the people who you have.

Isn't it anyway better for admin and security folks to have developers not get any ideas and stick to the bounds of the box?

The average developer doesn't understand networking at all. DNS is a mystery. TLS certs are scary. Routing is practically beyond comprehension.

I'm hosting from my home with a static ipv4 right now. It's been running for years without a single problem. I just put in a basic pf config. Everything is fine. It's not that scary.

I self host everything. Wireguard, locked down ssh configs with private keys, iptables firewall and fail2ban... Not really that hard

I've hosted stuff at home for almost 30 years, never bothered with a WAF. I have several VMs exposed with public IPs. If you keep your OS updated, it's hardly the end of the world. Sure, if you put up an unpatched OS from 10 years ago, you're going to have problems.

All of this. I despair with some of the takes on basic technology being hard. And when you try to defend understanding just the most rudimentary things, you're labeled a problem because you should just be paying out the nose for the service and writing even more shit code to cover it up.

Yes and developers these days don’t know assembly like I learned at 12. Does it matter?

I’m sure the list of things that you don’t know that some other developers do know is long.

No one is an “expert” at everything. I know AWS well (trust me on this) and I’ve used more services than you can imagine in a production capacity. I choose not to know the intricacies of Linux and front end development for instance. That’s either “someone else’s problem” or in the former case, I just give a zip file with my code in it and run it in Lambda or a Docker container and run it using a managed Kubernetes/ECS cluster, use Lambda (yes you can deploy a Docker container to Lambda) or Fargate (AWS manages instances in Docker cluster).

I actually kinda think ai will help with this, in a roundabout way.

I think of AI as a kind of floor, a minimum required skill to be able to get a job as a professional anything. If you want to find paid work as a developer, you have to at least be better than AI at the job.

Optimistically AI will filter out all the helpless Devs who can't get anything done from the job market. "Code monkeys" won't be a thing.

Juniors will have to enter unpaid trainee programs I guess, but that might not be such a bad thing

I feel the issue is that now, what would be done by entire teams (networking team, storage team, database team), is now perform by only the same DevOps team.

We have way less time unfortunately to dig into each tech, business is pressing us like lemon on the other side to ship quickly.

Bet you never thought you'd have a "when I was a kid" attitude… :)

For those who DID think "I wonder what my 'when I was a kid' will be about when I'm old" what kind of things did you guess it'd be and what did it actually end up being?

I'm only in my 30s but I was thinking recently "when I'm retired I feel like I'm going to be telling stories about how back in my day we had this thing called the filesystem and you'd just browse it directly..."

Man, just this week I had a moment like this that killed me. I had just woken my tweenager up for school and realized I’d turned into the kind of asshole who comes into your room in a good mood at 6 am. Stood in the shower and came to terms with that, but it took a while.

Always assumed I would, but I thought it was that the youngsters would be running circles around me (in this domain) the way I ran circles around the olds when I was a kid.

What happened is that as an Xennial (young genX / old millennial) I know way more about computers than either generation to the side of me. This includes younger devs. I knew way more than them when I was their age. As a teen I was hacking C to get my 386 with Slackware Linux that I installed from floppies online by modding SLIRP to run on the sun3 I had dial up access to so I could pipe serial SLIP through it. Learned all about everything happening under the hood on a network.

I don’t feel self congratulatory about this. I feel depressed. If the kids were all smarter than me it would give me more hope for the future.

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