Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 31, 2013 17:02 UTC (Thu) by davidstrauss (guest, #85867)
In reply to: Poettering: The Biggest Myths by nye
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

> Conversely it could be said that a sysadmin who is happy to spend a few hours here and there learning to use something new that solves problems *they don't have* is too ready to waste time.

A boss managing sysadmins with that attitude has zero respect for employee skill development or finding improved ways to do even the company's own work. It creates a workplace that hires people and spits them out ten years later with no recent skill development. Around here, the Bay Area, that approach couldn't even retain a good sysadmin. They'd quit for a company that shows them more respect.

But, maybe you don't have the experience to understand that. I've actually owned companies employing engineers and sysadmins for the last eight years, both here in and in Austin. The way to keep good people is to go out of your way as an employer to foster careers and skill development through side projects, training, books, conferences, and community involvement.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Feb 2, 2013 19:11 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The Bay Area is unusual. I was considered almost freakish in the City of London for wanting to keep my (software development) skills up to date. Just use what everyone else is using! Follow the herd and learn the hot stuff only when everyone else learns it! Baaaa.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Feb 2, 2013 22:04 UTC (Sat) by davidstrauss (guest, #85867) [Link]

> The Bay Area is unusual. I was considered almost freakish in the City of London for wanting to keep my (software development) skills up to date. Just use what everyone else is using! Follow the herd and learn the hot stuff only when everyone else learns it!

I've done lots of work in London for The Economist and Cap Gemini. While they're both conservative in their technology choices, I'd have trouble generalizing it to the London area as a whole, mostly based on me having such a small sample size of organizations.

I've already mentioned Austin in my post, too, but devops culture aggressively focused on improving sysadmin work also extends to Portland (Puppet Labs), Seattle (Opscode), Austin/Chicago (bcfg2 and devops events), Berlin (systemd), New York, Boston, and a host of other cities with major projects or conferences devoted to improving the the way we do things.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Feb 4, 2013 13:09 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

The point is, I'm sure you're not seriously suggesting that every time some new idea comes along, every sysadmin in the world should either be chomping at the bit to spend hours learning about it or be labelled as 'incompetent' and fired.

That's what I was responding to, and it's absurd. Nobody would ever get anything done.

I was attempting to make a rhetorical point, and clearly didn't do very well. I'm not suggesting that wanting to improve one's skills is a bad thing, but characterising anyone who doesn't immediately want to jump onto every new bandwagon as lazy and incompetent is appalling.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Feb 4, 2013 14:28 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I'm not suggesting that wanting to improve one's skills is a bad thing, but characterising anyone who doesn't immediately want to jump onto every new bandwagon as lazy and incompetent is appalling.

I think that with systemd we're quickly getting past the »new bandwagon« stage. With the major enterprise-type distributions (RHEL and SLES) slated to replace System V init by systemd in the foreseeable future, administrators of machines based on these distributions, along with their spinoffs such as CentOS or Scientific Linux, could do worse than start getting used to systemd. On many other popular distributions, systemd is at least an option that is available to those interested in it, and it is quite likely that most of these distributions will also move over in time.

The nice thing is that systemd, for all it is being dissed by the traditionalists, is in fact in many ways an improvement on the tangle of »System V init plus distribution-specific init scripts plus various distribution-specific bits of infrastructure not actually part of System V init but tacked on to make it work in practice« that many system administrators are saddled with. In my experience, it doesn't take long for somebody who approaches systemd with an open mind to see that there actually might be something to it after all. Also, using systemd in place of System V init isn't exactly rocket science; it's not as if system administrators were suddenly forced to learn Mandarin in order to be able to keep their systems running.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Feb 4, 2013 19:16 UTC (Mon) by davidstrauss (guest, #85867) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm sure you're not seriously suggesting that every time some new idea comes along, every sysadmin in the world should either be chomping at the bit to spend hours learning about it or be labelled as 'incompetent' and fired.

No, I'm saying that "a few hours here and there learning to use something new" isn't a bad thing. I put that in quotes because that's what you actually said was bad.

Arguing that's valuable is hardly saying that "every time some new idea comes along, every sysadmin in the world should either be chomping at the bit to spend hours learning about it or be labelled as 'incompetent' and fired."

Don't create straw men out of my arguments.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Feb 6, 2013 12:08 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>Don't create straw men out of my arguments.

I didn't. That's why I said "I'm sure you're not" before paraphrasing the argument that the other guy made, specifically to point out that what you're arguing for is *not* what I'm arguing against.

I'm trying to say that you can support the idea that people might want to educate themselves without jumping right to "and anyone who doesn't always want to do that is incompetent".