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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

Average ops have never been less capable and adverse to programming than now. The problem is getting worse, not better. I know because I am in ops and one of the few who loves to code and accidentally entered the field

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No way. I have worked in ops for 20 years now; almost everyone knows how to code. Some enjoy it and some don't, but people are capable of it and will do it when needed.

I agree many can code, though a subset are certainly more scripting than engineering (like a typical 3-tier app)

There is also a subset that is very allergic to coding at this point. I've interviewed enough to see people who only know HCL/yaml. There is enough need and work (waste?) in the space that roles like this can exist

I see where you were coming from now. That sounds more like the Infra team. There are ops teams who are segmented in different ways. In my ops team, I don’t touch the infra and they don’t touch the applications.

I think that any kind of “modern ops” necessarily includes coding, even if there isn’t a ton of Python or Rust being generated as part of the workflow.

Kubernetes deployment configurations and Ansible playbooks are code. PromQL is code. Dockerfiles and cloud-init scripts are code. Terraform HCL is code.

It’s all code I personally hate writing, but that doesn’t make it less valid “software development” than (say) writing React code.

These things are not nearly equivalent. It’s writing code, it’s not software engineering.

Correct, it’s systems engineering.

It's configuration management, systems engineering is low level imo

I think you have it backwards. Systems engineering is the big picture discipline of designing & managing complex systems while config management is a specific process within that.

But the same is true of devs. Many of them are pretty clueless about coding. It's a whole generation of "bootcamp people" who were designers or bartenders and heard there were more lucrative jobs.

This is a red flag. You should find a new Ops team to work with.

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