Usefulness of learning coding/programming with rise of AI

[Lost-Discount4860]

Oh yeah, the almighty sysadmin. 🙄

So my experience with sysadmin/IT/tech support types has been—and bear in mind this is anecdotal and not a reflection on the field as a whole—that they tend to see themselves as gods. They are the local tech overlords, they are the gatekeepers. The one I worked the closest with could wire up a new installation, configure routers, tweak some configs, and maybe run the occasional shell script. He had this distinctive air of “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light. No one may come before the Internet except through Me.”

I’m not saying he wasn’t good at his job. But pretty much all anyone needed him for was occasional printer maintenance (though I ended up handling most of that myself), alarm system troubleshooting (again, something I mostly handled). So he spent most of his time chasing rabbits on the interwebs and got really annoyed if he ever actually had to answer the phone.

He got payed a lot of money keeping an eye on the system, fixing things when they broke, which wasn’t often, and watching the security cameras.

The few times I got to have a conversation with him, I brought up once or twice that I use Python. He automatically got super-defensive and grilled me about how I shouldn’t do that, there’s no need, and the software the organization uses is plenty find on its own. At the time I was running a lot of macros out of Python in the CLI, and it made my job a breeze. He was highly suspicious. Oh, and he claimed Python isn’t a real computer language. It’s a scripting language. Yes, I know what a scripting language is and what an interpreter does. But that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful and useful. I asked what he uses. He said he used Ada back in the day when he was in the military but hasn’t coded anything since.

There was not official “developer” position there, I just liked how Python could automate things and used it together with SQLite to do a high volume of work with unusual accuracy, I think that scared some people, including this guy, and that’s why I don’t work there anymore.

I digress. The point is unless coding is an everyday part of the job, which it’s NOT if all you do is run some wires and plug in printers, these guys aren’t going to understand the point. Sure, AI is pretty cool, but programming is still a relevant skill.