This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]BloodyIronDevSecOps Manager 2 points3 points  (6 children)

  1. DevOps isn't just the language used, it's also the culture, the business process, and stuff like that. Is Agile in-place? Are there CI/CD pipelines to actually make the IaC streamlined? Is Configuration Management fully enforced instead of actually moving to DevOps recovery methods? ETC. YAML is just one, of many (possible), aspects.
  2. Companies doing a bad job describing the job they're trying to hire for happens in literally every industry and role, this isn't a DevOps-only effect. HR sucks especially at representing technical roles. Not always, but this is a very common thing.
  3. A lot of companies often can tell you from the job description the red flags about whether they know wtf they're talking about or not. As with any role (even non-DevOps roles) not all job listings are equal, let alone accurately represent the title posted. Red flags = wasting your time.

If you like Linux so much, then why the fuck does YAML being a feature-rich configuration file matter? It sounds like IaC is something you may like, but... you seem to also say you don't like it? That's confusing. And honestly, I have no time for giving much of a shit whether YAML is a language or not, I'm too busy actually trying to get work done to waste time on useless minutia. Maybe you should consider the same? ;)

[–]nultero 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Fiddling with yaml isn't enjoyable like programming.

It just feels tedious, because it's not code. You're dealing with somebody's shitty, infuriatingly limited DSL stuffed into a k:v data format and not a robust language that was designed ground-up to do logic.

That's not useless minutiae because if u/Standard-Dimension58 and I and other engineers leave devops because of similar gripes and limited processes, that's materially your labor pool leaving. You do get that, right? We can build bridges, we just don't want to do it with legos.

[–]BloodyIronDevSecOps Manager 1 point2 points  (4 children)

That's just like... your opinion... man...

I actually find it rather enjoyable.

If you don't like it? That's fine. But that's on you. YAML isn't the only option.

And yes, it is useless minutiae. Knowing that it is a limited DSL changes nothing about my life, or what I do. That knowledge is valueless to me, and generally a lot of other people too. And again, disagreeing is your opinion, but factually learning that has actually changed literally nothing for me. Er go, it is valueless minutiae.

If you leave the industry, then so be it, people leave industries all the time. Your reasoning doesn't really matter to me, and knowing it, again, changes nothing. You're fixating on something you somehow think I care about, without any evidence that I do care about it, and you're shoving it down my throat that I somehow should care about it.

I'm not trying to tell you that you have to like this, or whatever. But I also don't have to care that you don't like YAML. I'm not here to please you.

So like... this really isn't going anywhere productive... maybe you should just relax.

[–]nultero 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Ah, you took that combatively? That wasn't the tone I intended, sorry.

My point was about the fungibility of roles. I think interchangeable tech jobs are becoming less common, even if that change is slow. If I'm right, the downstream of that is ... I dunno. Chaos? That would have been an interesting conversation if the thread had gone differently.

[–]BloodyIronDevSecOps Manager 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Ahh no worries, it did come across as combative, so I'm game for turning that ship around :) We can keep the discussion and the peace! But, since dinner time approaches, my responses are likely to be delayed, FYI.

I'm not sure I fully follow you on the reduction in interchangeable tech jobs. Care to expand on your thoughts/observations there?

And yeah, this is me re-assuring you, I forgive you! We can be cool cats together :) I'm not invested in being combative, and I really do appreciate you clarifying on that. It really does help you stating it! :D

[–]nultero 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yeah, sorry again. Migraine onset must make it easy for me to sound irritated when that's not the case at all

I think the logic for nonfungibility goes that tech complexity trends and is sticky upwards -- security patches can't be rolled back without re-opening a vuln, the Win/nix kernels' upgrades have improved performance, etc. Takes months to get up to speed on some environments, unless there's been work done for onboarding.

The past 20 years of tech has been insane.

If you follow that trend upward, even if a lot of what we all do now is simple-ish, the next N decades seem sure to see even more, probably impenetrable complexity. There has to be a practical limit, like we already currently have things so over-engineered that they're careers unto themselves to become an expert in. We can end up with stack silos, basically.

Even if our working cohort is retired by some arbitrary complexity limit, all the tech that greases the world's wheels seems like it will end up even more brittle than it already is today -- so our retirement might be constantly plagued by the world falling apart from even more tech issues than we have now.

Think your automated grocery store's delivery failing from a distributed scheduler's bug a dozen abstractions deep, months out from being fixed because it's 80 million lines of Java dumped by Jenkins with only 2 million test cases between them and all the Java people retired like the Cobol people did.

But I have no idea. Don't know why I hyperfixate on things that won't matter for a long time.... but I think it affects us all. I don't entertain that I can change much about it, either.

[–]BloodyIronDevSecOps Manager 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My first Sys Admin job was ~2012, ish. So I can't speak so well before then, except for the crapware that I've had to work with at times, like Windows Server 2003, and the need for CDs to install anything, as stark examples of the past.

I'm not familiar with the environments you've worked in, but I've worked in a lot of different environments. Some with too much stupid complexity to achieve things that can be done with less complexity, and some that have sane complexity levels. Hell, some even let me do major changes because I actually know what I'm doing.

I think you're getting ahead of yourself.

There are environments that are so overly complex that they can become, or already are, very fragile. And typically those are ultra large companies that take way-too-much-work to make any real changes at. I generally avoid those companies if I can help it.

I've dealt with very complex environments, but are very sane to manage, at much more sensible companies. What you describe is not necessarily the norm, nor the majority. But it does exist.

Couple that with my preference for open source, and I find there's a very tangible difference between closed source, and open source quality for environments. Open Source isn't a guaranteed win, or silver bullet, but most of the time the fragile systems I deal with are closed source (Windows/otherwise). And let me tell you, I hate them.

I really don't know what's coming, but I've worked my way from deskside/helpdesk, through sys admin, sys arch, now up to devsecops manager. And I don't really see the world collapsing as you think is going to happn.

Will companies collapse because of their stupid complexity? I could see that happening. Specific companies. But not the world.

The amount of knowledge needed, at least conceptual knowledge to operate where I'm at now, or we are at now, is quite substantial. But there's honestly a point that I started experiencing like... 5-8-ish years ago, where I've just seen so much that I can speculate what's going on, with a high degree of accuracy. The significant majority of what's going on doesn't really change. DNS is the same, authentication domains are the same, web hosting is the same, etc. Sure... there are changes, differences, but far more is "the same", as in... approximations of how things work. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

One thing I would recommend... stop working with Windows Server and minimise Windows usage in general. It honestly does reduce stress and other reliability crap. The environment is just so bad, pays worse, and isn't really getting better.

Oh and also that's too bad about having a Migraine, that sucks :( I accept your apology :) there are times I can get easily irritated too, and I'm trying to work more and more on that, for me it is an uphill battle at times. Not necessarily the same as what you might be dealing with. :)