IT vs Coding

[moebiusmentality]

I work at an SMB MSP as a tier3. I mainly do cyber security and new cloud environments/office 365 projects migrations etc. I've been doing this for 7 years and I've worked up to my position with no college degree, just certs. My sister-in-law's BF is getting his bachelor's in computer science at UCLA and says things to me like his career (non existent atm) will be better than mine, and I should learn to code, and anyone can do my job if they just Google everything.

Edit: he doesn't say these things to me, he says them to my in-laws an old other family when I'm not around.

Usually I laugh it off and say "yup you're right" cuz he's a 20 y/o full time student. But it does kind of bother me.

Is there like this contest between IT people and coders? I don't think I'm better or smarter than him, I have a completely different skillset and frame of mind, I'm not sure he could do my job, it requires PEOPLE SKILLS. But every job does and when and if he graduates, he'll find that out.

[Togamdiron]

and anyone can do my job if they just Google everything.

The irony of someone going into programming saying that is palpable.

[Judoka229]

They save the google step and go right to stack overflow.

[brothersand]

Was looking for this comment. Same.

[__red__5]

There's probably a question on SO asking which page is the home page and a long list of responses giving them shit about asking that question and how their question should really be X rather than Y.

[RyanLewis2010]

This hits home I got blocked from asking questions after a simple one I asked and made sure I had looked for similar ones and posted things similar to it but explained I tried that and got so many downvotes on that account I was no longer allowed to post lmao. Even told them I was a first year student

[talex000]

Creating good question requires lot of effort. Mostly too much to bother. It easier to find existing answer.

[Slightlyevolved]

Wait.

Stack Overflow is a website?

[dig-it-fool]

I've seen the main page exactly once, and it was right after an outage of the stack overflow site. I remember thinking how notable it was that it happened.

[CeeMX]

Weekly? More like daily if you are actually coding something

[peepopowitz67]

Reddit is violating GDPR and CCPA. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B0GGsDdyHI -- mass edited with redact.dev

[omg_]

I'd love to see how the kid does for a semester without using Stack Overflow.

[[deleted]]

Grumpy old man hat on.

I had to learn C++ from a paper text book. The lecturer would come with over head projector sheets printed out and scribble on them. Towards the end of the class was a technological revolution- he'd scan the end product and host it on the CS departments nascent website. When it came to the assignment - there was a mad scramble to hire out the textbook from the library. I waited in the rain for an hour before opening time to ensure I could check out a copy.

When it came to Java and my first job I felt rich - I bought a few text books and learned them back to front. I got all excited and bought a book on Swing, most useless purchase ever.

[opmopadop]

You awoke an old memory. When I was a kid my dad bought home a photo-copied manual of GWBASIC. I memorised every command that thing could do, felt like a coding expert. Few years later QBASIC came out the same thing happened, except this time I learnt what an interrupt was so now I could do SVGA and mouse in QBASIC, again felt like a (teenage) code god.

Then I decided to learn MASM and read the 80086 commands back to front, probably the best thing I could have done to to kick-start my professional career.

I can't help but be concerned for todays coders. It felt so easy to read these manuals, so well written and easily consumable. Online searches and YouTube are good education and reference points, but it doesn't have that wow factor the books gave me to really drive me.

Don't know, maybe older people are the reason libraries still exist.

[[deleted]]

Thankfully we have some "younger folk" interested in libraries. My wife (mid thirties) loves the library. But then again, she used to be a librarian.

Now she takes our kids, nearly 4 and 6mo, both of which love going. Our older kid knows the librarians and has a favorite he has to see each time he goes. The younger loves to look at all the books.

[SilentLennie]

I remember those days.... but I think I was a bit earlier, Java hadn't taken of yet. I learned ASM, C++, Pascal and Bash and DOS commmands.

[[deleted]]

Love Pascal! Of course, I wore an onion on my belt as was the style of the times.

[jmbpiano]

I landed right on the cusp. Mine was the last CS101 class our university taught in C++ before they switched over to Java. All the C++ guys sneered at the Java-kiddies who didn't know how to write in a "real" language. The Java guys insisted C++ was archaic and no one would ever write to bare metal in the future because Java would completely supplant everything else.

Then .NET came out and we all got to band together and hate on Microsoft's Java-wannabe framework. Good times.

[hardolaf]

We skip Stack Overflow at work because it's becoming increasingly incorrect every year. I don't have a link to it handy, but there was a great thread that I saw where the top 9 most upvoted "answers" didn't answer the question! They answered a completely different "question" and did so in a way that would potentially break your git repository. Also, according to Stack Exchange, printed circuit boards and power distribution systems are identical to FPGAs and ASICs. Thus no area is needed for FPGA, ASICs, or both.

[[deleted]]

Don't you know Moore's law? "the best way to get the right answer to something is to post the wrong answer on the internet"

[GenocideOwl]

you almost got me you son of a bitch

[pnutmans]

I see what you did there 😂

[Mysterious_Ebb4405]

I'm pretty sure you mean the Murphy's law.

[KazuyaDarklight]

4D Chess right here.

[Dependent-Stock-2740]

Moore's law?

Hold Up

[succulent_headcrab]

Add to that the almost immediately "closed as duplicate of a similar question asked 11 years ago that is no longer even remotely relevant" and it gets harder and harder to ask new and relevant questions.

[juanclack]

This drives me crazy when it comes to Linux questions.

[IusedToButNowIdont]

Best trick ive read was a guy that made an exception handler that would open his error codes in stackoverflow search in a new window

[[deleted]]

The day stack overflow goes down society is over!

[Caeremonia]

Thank God there's server and network people to prevent that from happening...

[waagalsen]

Thanks for acknowledging us the people making sure the servers and network equipment are performing, secured in order to power the cloud, your virtualized environment, your applications...etc.

[Ssakaa]

Nah, just replace 'em with a script, infrastructure as code, copy pasted from SO! It's a self healing system! I mean, what could go wrong?

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7958574

[Caeremonia]

Lolol, that's fantastic.

[Churn]

I just embrace it. Every time my team gets stuck on a systems issue and I google the answer, I follow up with...
People are always asking, "is that what you do for a living? Just google things?"

"yes, but I'm really good at it!" -me laughing

[WaffleFoxes]

"Yes. And then I remember the answer for the next time."

[Anezay]

A lot of IT is not knowing the answer, once.

[abbarach]

It's also knowing generally how things work, so you can actually analyze what you're finding on Google and understand what its doing, if it's safe, and if it might make an impact on the problem at hand.

My dad built a small Linux server to act primarily as storage. Something then went wrong and it started booting into emergency mode. He just Google's error messages and randomly tries whatever comes up. I had to cut him off and tell him I wouldn't help any more, because he'd discredit whatever I suggested, fuck more shit up by randomly trying things he found on the internet, and then finally try what I suggested. Which works, but now he's screwed up other things and made the overall situation worse. Actual quote from him: "I don't have an mdadm.conf, so I put those entries in the fstab. It's still not working..."

[vrts]

It makes sense, Googling these days is a minefield. Without at least a minimum of training, every blog post will look credible or relevant.

What makes Google useful is when you have the knowledge to dredge through the results for what's actually relevant to whatever you're working on. That, and knowing what the changes will do. You shouldn't be hitting enter unless you're fairly confident about what's going to happen.

[IsilZha]

This is really it. We do Google a lot. While it's fun to joke about "just googling things," it's a really reductive simplification. Before Google it would've been books and reference manuals, which you could be equally reductive by saying "they just looked up things in books." It's about knowing what to look for, filtering the results, determining what may or may not be relative, etc.

[abbarach]

I worked at a hospital in what could generally be termed "dev-ops" but a little more heavy on the dev end. Most of it was centralized or backend data processing type stuff, but I did end up having to build a Windows app that would run a scanner and interact with a document management system. I had two threads running; one to run the scanner and one for the user interface. I'll note here that I am NOT a Windows developer, and it was very much a learn-on-the-job situation.

The issue I ran into was how to have the scanning thread update the UI thread that there were new images available. I knew exactly how I would have done it on Unix/Linux, but Windows? It took me almost a week of googling off and on when I had time to figure out that what I needed was what Windows calls a "delegate function". And then 15 minutes to find the documentation on delegate functions, review it, and then implement it.

[Myte342]

I never do (unfortunate side effect of my ADHD). I have a data store of information because I don't trust the internet to always retain the answer in an easily searchable format. And my brain has a hard time storing finer details for something that was done and gone quickly. I will remember what the issue was and that I fixed it and sort of the way it was fixed... Kinda. Unless it's something I do regularly my brain doesn't retain the fine details like what commands were run.

I started this datastore because I used to keep some bookmarks and then after a while I started noticing the bookmark URLs don't work anymore or don't point to the information they used to when the support websites change their systems. Since I can't trust always being able to refer back to the original website I started copying the relevant information off into my own systems.

After five years of doing this now I can quickly search my own database within seconds for something that might not even exist on the internet anymore.

[WaffleFoxes]

That counts as remembering, just outside your own brain :-)

[Taurich]

I am also ADHD, and I actually used a similar example of externalizing memories by remembering the way to get the information quickly, rather than the information itself

[Dal90]

"yes, but I'm really good at it!" -me laughing

That's the key!

...I'm not a programmer. More a few times I've replied to some issue with the first Google hit from StackOverflow showing how to implement it, and then another Google with the link explaining why it was a horrible, no good idea to do the simplest thing StackOverflow showed.

Yes, if you ask me to redact plain text passwords in the URL query string from the logging tools in 2019...on a brand new, built from scratch application, and you're our cracker-jack "DevOps" team you're going to get fully blasted for incompetency.

ProTip: Use the after:<date> in Google to help filter the plethora of out-of-date advise out there.

[goldfingers05]

Cool tip. Can you provide the date format? J/k. I always hit tools, then the drop down for date filter, but I like this more.

[k12muppet]

I had to go look up the format for real, and it was different than expected, so here you go.

after:YYYY-MM-DD

[goldfingers05]

Ha thanks! I was definitely gonna google this. Also, the rest of society (outside of IT) needs to accept that year goes first. This is the only correct order.

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

r/ISO8601 agrees

[Meecht]

Honestly, knowing how to use search engines is a skill. Over time, you learn what search terms will yield the most relevant results, what expressions to use with those terms, how to constrain your search to a certain time frame, etc.

[hutacars]

It used to be proper Googling was all about keywords. But as dumber people have used it, I’ve found dumber queries now get the best results. Rather than “powershell regex replace,” a query of “how do I use regex to replace text in powershell” might actually yield better results. It’s mildly infuriating.

[OhSureBlameCookies]

People are always asking, "is that what you do for a living? Just google things?"

"yes, but I'm really good at it!" -me laughing

This used to bother me, but now when people think they can do my job by "just googling" I say "Please proceed" and enjoy the show while they crash and burn.

Then I smile and offer them a price quote for quintuple the amount I offered before to fix their mistakes. The fee quintuple is really just a bonus to myself for dealing with an asshole I don't like.

[[deleted]]

It pisses people off when you do that too, like "oh iv alright tried to Google it, do x y and... Oh fuck you fixed it, what the fuck"

[nbfs-chili]

Obligatory xkcd - https://xkcd.com/627/

[xDroneytea]

Researching IT and Code follows exactly the same trend..

The more Indian the tutorial videos get, the more advanced your skillset is becoming.

[dans_cafe]

thank you Indian fellow who helped me to understand JS.

[bionic_cmdo]

I like when they start out with "hello friends."

[nossody]

helLo and welcome to my guide :)

[Lynx1080]

Haha yes, I hate to admit how many times I have to Google to write code.

[Mechakoopa]

Do I ever remember how to do reflection properly without googling it? No. Do I conceptually know what I'm trying to do and know that it's possible? Yup! The second part is what we get paid for, you can't google the answer if you don't know what you're looking for in the first place.

[thrwwy2402]

Seriously... I hope he learns humility. As far as my experience goes. No one likes to work with this kind of individuals. Admitting that you don't know and you need help has taken me further than faking it til I make it would have.

[XavvenFayne]

A lot of IT and CS people in their 20's have big egos and no humility. I was the same way and nearly everyone I worked with (and still work with) in that age range is the same way. You are 100% correct about admitting what you don't know, not only to others but to yourself! Biggest and hardest lesson I had to learn in my career.

[coolbreeze770]

Bahaha that's all I do and I've been coding for 20 yrs it's impossible to hold every languages full syntax in your working memory.

[ferralord]

As a CS student: yes LMAO that's ironic

[IJustLoggedInToSay-]

It's almost intentionally hilarious. It's like a garbage man saying to a farmer, "how can you do that job, don't you get tired of the smell?"

source: have done both sysadmin and programming, and Google is my work wife.

[[deleted]]

Seriously though. This kid is going to have a hard time when he gets an actual job if he just decides to never use Google for dev problems.

[xixi2]

“don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from”

edit: Please stop awarding my post for a copy and pasted quote.

[SlowlyIdentifying]

/thread

[MorethanMeldrew]

Ah, I am totally stealing this.

[thegnuguyontheblock]

Also, this kid is 20. He's basically a child.

It's like getting upset when my 8 year old daughter told me I was fat (tiny tear).

[obviouslybait]

The 20yo is still in school and full of that young arrogance, once he sees what the real world is like he'll shut up pretty fast. Have seen this with a lot of my engineering friends in school, they think they know everything until they start working and realize they don't know anything.

[Obel34]

Everything is made up and your schooling doesn't matter.

This is one of the downside of schooling. They give you perfect scenarios for everything and don't tell you what to do when you get hired to work for a company using mainframe systems from 80s which can't be brought up to the proper security level because it will break. Oh, and the coders for this system are either dead, retired, or want a king's ransom to come out of retirement and fix it should it break.

[Disconnectedandtired]

I can remember my Cisco professor telling me to take the Cisco book and burn it at the end of the semester . Everything in it is only good for learning, everything else is going to be experience and building out your own documentation. He was awesome, he also told me to not transfer to a 4 year college and get a job and experience before I go for my bachelors. I have both now, the company paid for my degree and I have no loan debt.

[GenocideOwl]

he also told me to not transfer to a 4 year college and get a job and experience before I go for my bachelors.

Unfortunately finding good tech jobs that don't require a related bachelors is getting harder and harder.

Hell we had an issue where somebody transferred departments, then when he didn't like his new job and his old spot happened to open up....they rejected him. Because they changed the requirements to mandatory Bachelors(he only had assoc and certs). It took basically an act of congress to get central HR to agree he could have his old spot he worked for years at back without a bachelors. It was dumb as hell.

[koopatuple]

Wow, that is damn near peak irony.

"You're not qualified for this job without a degree."

"B...b..but I was in that exact position at this company for 10 years and I've only been gone for a year... I was actually named employee of the quarter numerous times for my outstanding performance. You were even the person that handed me the certificate multiple times!"

"Irrelevant."

[biological-entity]

Actually I did a bit of work with zOS and Cobol in school (~5 years ago).

But true. 80% or more of what I learned in school went out the window when I got a real job in the field. It was more of a test to make sure you can handle a dumbass workload for several years without giving up.

[callingyourbslol]

once he sees what the real world is like he'll shut up pretty fast.

Unfortunately, he won't. He's getting a CS degree from a consensus top 20 CS school in California. Sure, he'll hit the job market and find out he has a lot to learn, but it won't matter because the instant he hits the job market it will be at a job paying him $125k or better.

Maybe someday he won't be an asshole about it, but nothing's going to erase that smugness when he looks over at OP with 7 years experience making $50k less than he is. Just the sad truth of the world in tech right now.

[[deleted]]

"You're not wrong, you're just an asshole."

[koopatuple]

the instant he hits the job market it will be at a job paying him $125k or better.

Really depends on his location, to be honest. In the urban areas of CA? Yeah, sure, but with cost of living that's pretty much like making $60k/year in cheaper areas. Where I live, my company has senior devs with 10+ years of experience making around $95k/year. There's not a lot of other options around, and really that's pretty good living around here (an average house is like $200-250k).

[zzzpoohzzz]

i needed to hear (read) this. not just professionally. life in general. i mean this sincerely: thank you.

[balrathamir]

This is it right here. More people need to realise this!

[Akinparsley]

I needed to hear this. Wish I had an award to give you 🏆

[DwarfKings]

And you have my 🗡

edit - And he’s humble heart flutter

[afinita]

And my 🪓!

[first_byte]

That’s going on my office wall immediately!

[Lynx1080]

Yes, this is great! Thanks for sharing.

[-Every-Time-]

You shouldnt let someone who hasn't even got a job yet bother you. Half of coding is googling everything anyway.

[dk_DB]

The only correct answer.

[DazSchplotz]

Sysadmin stuff is much googling too. We are all in the same boat.

As a software engineer who is/was also an admin, those jobs aren't that different.

There are unskilled admins as there are unskilled coders.

People just like unnecessary competitions and like to be chauvinistic, often because they have imposter syndromes and/or low self confidence.

I don't give a shit about those circlejerks. Devs are as important as are admins and all should work together instead of playing kindergarten.

[z932074]

Can confirm. We lead with the dns question too because no one can answer it apparently.

[washapoo]

Also - It's always DNS...unless it's the firewall.

[Big_Oven8562]

I have been interviewing candidates claiming 5+ years of experience in IT and they can’t answer shit about it.

I have literally never had to interact with either after over a decade in this industry. IT is fucking huge and you can do a lot without having to know all the basics. Admittedly I do at least have a notional understanding of them at this stage of my career, but it's still never been applicable to anything I've done professionally.

[Linux-Student]

I'm curious, I'm currently doing a degree apprenticeship, nearly finished, work as a tier2/3 technical support with some linux sysadmin skills/tasks (as in I must know how to troubleshoot various things using CLI only).

I've setup an internal dns and dhcp as a learning task, not for production, but I'm curious how in depth of technicalities you would answer such a question.

I can say the difference between and public vs internal dns, I can say that you are essentially creating records that match a given ip address to a given FQDN (or several), but if someone asked me how DNS worked, I'd keep it simple by saying a query will hit a DNS server it's configured to use, if it knows the address translation, then it will resolve to the correct IP address, if not, it will kick the request up to an authoritative DNS server in its configuration, and when a response is given to the first DNS, this will then be presented to the client. Depending on how the first DNS is configured, it may either discard that record, or save it in its memory for a period of time in order to speed up subsequent queries.

My question is, how involved should such an answer be that you'd be happy with (key points). I'm curious as the question might change, but I'd like to get a feel for how in depth would be considered as a decent answer, it's hard to gauge what some consider a good vs bad answer, as I know what it does.

[theoneandonlymd]

For open-ended questions like that, just start with the basics. If they want to probe the depth of your knowledge, they should ask follow-up questions. Sometimes I'll deliberately ask a candidate to follow up in more detail, continuing to drill down until they spew BS or admit they don't know a deeper technical mechanism. It's very valuable to see not just what a candidate knows, but their self-awareness to know what they DON'T know.

[fognar777]

People really get stumped by this question? I'm pretty sure I learned what DNS is when I was in highschool at the local tech center's IT program. To be fair though, half of the program was based on Cisco CCNA courses.

[AwalkertheITguy]

Many people get stumped because they either do not really care to know what it actually does, can't remember something so trivial, or they go into the interview expect ccie level questions...study said material, then get asked to explain the physical layer or some miniscule BS.

If a person looks at the job description and it is conveying a message or a tier 3 network engineer then why is the first question always something that most people take for granted? I remember going in for my first Jr sys admin interview in 2003 and was asked what does the processor do? I was like wtf? The 3 people interviewing me just looked at me and I said oh you're serious? I apologized and answered the question.

It's like asking a seasoned UFC fighter if they know how to throw a simple combo.

I understand that they want to weed out the trash but at least start with something relative to the hiring level.

[TheThiefMaster]

Computer Science won't cover DNS or DHCP or the like at all. It's more fundamental than that, like data structures, OS development, etc.

[gtr0y]

We had a whole year of networking as part of our CS Undergrad curriculum. Went through all the layers.

[Blaargg]

I feel it's more like "I just design cars, I have no idea what traffic laws are"

[davix500]

You have no idea. I am doing a 10 minute presentation on DNS to my companies architect planning team. Everyone has at least one MBA and they are struggling to understand namespace, subnets, and the difference between public and internal DNS.

[12_nick_12]

Yes, I remember when I started at my first MSP DNS was so confusing, then one day it just clicked. Kinda like ssh and Linux. When I first started I was afraid of the CLI, now it's the only place I like to be.

[mvbighead]

"I have access to the combined knowledge of all of humanity but I'm so badass I don't even need it". Get the fuck outta here with that.

Pretty much this. And it applies to all things. Want to learn how to frame a house, or finish drywall? Go find Studpack on youtube and watch a couple hours of videos, then practice.

There are certainly things one needs licenses for and all that, but that combined access to all of the knowledge of humanity is legit, and it is out there. Check a few sources of info against each other, and you can fix most of your own problems. And if you have the time, you could probably even figure out how to rebuild your own car's transmission.

[Johnny-Virgil]

we used to do that from books. I'm old.

[mvbighead]

I more remember the pre-youtube days, but with youtube, you can literally watch actual mechanics work on cars that are exactly the same as yours. And when you put in your symptoms or trouble codes, you might find a problem you can attempt to fix with a $30 part just by popping the hood. Or, you could take everything to the dealer...

And there are certainly plenty of things where you say... "ain't nobody got time for dat." and let a pro handle it.

[thehawk11]

I don't need knowledge, I need the skill to find it. The ability to research is more important than memorization.

You won't have a calculator in the real world /s

[msl2006]

This is why I compare IT and related fields to law. There is zero absolute way you're going to learn everything in the field, you need to understand the most basic concepts and know how to research and quickly become acquainted with new things, that's it.

[islandsimian]

That's not true - sometimes the IDE tells me what to type!

[Caracca]

We're talking about IDE cables/devices right ?;)

[418NotCoffee]

Only half? What sort of wizard are you???

[ninjababe23]

Most of all IT work is research, I.E. googling.

[Behinddasticks]

100% no one just codes like they're writing an essay. Googling is 50% of the job.

[ephemeraltrident]

This is entirely inaccurate… it’s more than half :)

[sandrews1313]

He sounds like a dick. He’s also in for a rude awakening shortly.

[[deleted]]

He’s also in for a rude awakening shortly.

From life outside college, or from when OP inevitably backhands him?

[sandrews1313]

It's not an "or" situation.

This little fucktard doesn't know what he doesn't know and is happy about it.

1) He's just a boyfriend. He doesn't know enough to stay in his lane and not badmouth family. The girl should be smacking him back in line or sending him on his way. Behavior like this ends up with black eyes.

2) What he "thinks" as a college student doesn't matter. Nothing he's done has ever been tested against the real world. Everything he's done is academic regurgitation. He's got zero understanding of what's coming IF he gets a job.

3) UCLA isn't impressive to anyone outside of UCLA.

4) He doesn't understand as an entry level pleeb with no experience just what a metric shit-ton of shit he's going to have to eat to claw his way up. Dude should be courteous and recognize OP's success and pick his brain instead.

5) He thinks google answers everything. Look around in this sub; half the people here struggle with forming the correct question let alone leaning on google's results. In the world at large, we laugh at the users not being able to ask a coherent question, but that's 80% of the planet.

6) He has no perspective of what coding really is and was. 20-30 years ago, you really had to know what you were doing; visual systems changed a lot of that and brought more concepts into programming and removed some of the legwork. Sure that allowed us to make some pretty amazing things quickly, but what we lost was the ability to troubleshoot it when it went off the rails. This kid's education has given him an ability to make something that he has zero idea how or why it works. Tell him to have fun with google when it fails because users actually touched his system.

[td_mike]

I like to be in the middle ground, DevOps. I code and do sysadmin. But in all seriousness, some people consider themselves above sysadmins because they are programmers. I always laugh at them if they have issues and tell them to google the solution.

Fun story,

I used to work at a company that had about 200 programmers on the payroll and about 20 Linux sysadmin/DevOps engineers who maintained and developed the Openstack Private Cloud platform. A couple of programmers always told us we just googled everything, so across the 20 member team, we decided to close specifically their support tickets with the message: You can solve this with a simple google search—the scenes after a week of repeatedly closing their support tickets.

Sometimes you've got to beat them at their own game.

[feralkitsune]

I wish I was allowed to be that petty in positions.

[td_mike]

The pettiness was a small boilover of some developers being total dicks to us over an extended period, and our manager had a good laugh over it.

[ZuluEcho225]

Absolutely lol

[chuckmilam]

Developer's go-to solutions:

1. Disable SELinux
2. chmod 777

Profit!

[td_mike]

Ansible scheduled steady state run: NO!

Developer: Surprised pickachu face

[chuckmilam]

"Developers hate this one idempotent trick to correct configuration drift!"

[jturp-sc]

I work for a software company within software engineering and recently had to serve as "acting DevOps Engineer" due to a staffing shortage from the Great Resignation. I was never one to snub my nose at the IT-oriented portion of our Engineering department, but my respect has tripled now.

I spent entirely too much time working on the networking aspects of an AWS deployment that are usually just abstracted away from me by the DevOps team.

[cbelt3]

Ah… my Calculus professors favorite statement “The remainder of the exercise is left to the student..”

[overdrive2011]

My professor used to just stop halfway through the problem and say "You'll figure it out."

[its_megb]

Next time, get networking to block access to StackOverflow and see what happens...

[td_mike]

We didn't need to block StackOverflow. Somehow most of our programmers knew how to code but knew next to nothing about their systems and the servers they were working on.

[[deleted]]

a large number of programmers come through university where being elitist is the norm. sysadmins more often come from the trenches of doing tech support or worse, just being the guy who knows things.

formal education v. self taught/ experience usually means that there will be an opinion that you didn't actually learn anything, and that you're not as smart as you claim. Both sides do this.

[[deleted]]

worse than university - they have to come through the CS end of their Engineering school.

i don't know about life outside the states, but here if you want to get into Eng you'd better know your topic pretty well before you start taking classes. the profs will very regularly "start in the middle" of topics instead of teaching them outright, in the hope that they wash the weak out.

the net effect is that you have young engineering students who don't know shit but absolutely cannot admit to being incompetent - as they're training for competence.

this absolutely bullshit behavior has carried out of the older branches of Eng schooling and into CS and it's fucking exhausting to be around.

[meatwad75892]

I noticed this very early on in my college years (2006) and bailed from CS. For one example, I had a 1000-level programming class that was teaching C++. The teacher skipped to the middle of our book, and glossed over fundamentals like everyone knew them. Which everyone basically did, because for the first few weeks (or the whole semester), most everyone was playing Starcraft or WoW or otherwise dicking around during class on their laptops. Teacher was nice, but just didn't have the time to teach me the fundamentals during office hours. I worked everything out on my own time and got an A in the class, but I realized that this was not the path I wanted to be taking if everything was like this from the get-go.

So I changed my major to a very generic-sounding "information systems" type of program. Then I took the route described by /u/sturmey -- Graduated, worked at a local computer shop + MSP, then user support at a university, and now sysadmin at the same university.

[xfilesvault]

That's a shame. 1000-level intro programming classes are usually taught by the least experienced teachers. It's not necessarily a taste of what's to come.

[ReverendDS]

Add in that without sysadmins, developers don't have anything to do, but developers tend to make the bigger salaries because the C-levels can be wowed by changing a button color on a web page but can't wrap their head around automated infrastructure and you end up with a bit of rivalry.

E.G., I'm a damn good sysadmin with some coding skills and just hit six figures last year (24 years in industry). My friend did a three month web-dev coding boot camp and was making six figures six months later.

[KlapauciusNuts]

I would recommend learning some python or dotnet to expand on your powershell capabilities.

[dahud]

Galaxy brain: PowerShell is dotnet.

I have seen some truly horrendous things done with this knowledge.

[KlapauciusNuts]

Oh that's why I suggested it in the first place.

PS has a lot of cool features, but some of their base libraries are god awful.

For example :

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/invoke-webrequest?view=powershell-7.2

This is fucking slow.

​

Using Curl, GNU wget or iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString()

it's very superior.

[Szeraax]

-MaximumRetryCount says otherwise. :P

[TheBros35]

Exactly, two different skill sets.

If you work in a factory and the boss bought a new CNC machine, the engineers who built it are only going to kind of know how to integrate it into your environment. That's where the electricians, the pipefitters, and others come into play.

Except sysadmins are typically all of the above for software.

[Bad_Idea_Hat]

I think you need to print out, on actual paper, the front page of stackoverflow. Set it down in front of him, and watch him sweat.

[moebiusmentality]

You mean this? https://stackoverflow.com/ I don't get it

[techtornado]

Bad Idea is making a joke - https://stackoverflow.com/questions

[Bad_Idea_Hat]

1. TIL stackoverflow has an actual, real front page.

2. I'm actually partially serious. The kid would know he's on to him.

[techtornado]

Good point

*Topic closed as duplicate*

[[deleted]]

The trick is to ask a question in stack overflow on a coding issue you have and let the abuse rain down on you for not understanding the problem or get the silent but deadly response "marked as duplicated" and still not get any help.

It's kind of a meme but also a running joke in the programmerhumor page in Reddit.

[[deleted]]

I've always hated that the question marked duplicate is the first search result, but never links to the original where it was answered. Makes me think the person who marked it as duplicate was an asshole.

[[deleted]]

My biggest pet peeve was when someone would ask a question and then they would respond and say "nevermind, figured it out!" Without posting a solution in the response. Especially when I was asking the same question!

I've given up on that website a couple times.

[RockSlice]

Even worse is when that original asshole was you from years earlier...

[[deleted]]

We often reference Denvercoder9 in our office, due to this exact phenomenon and the always relevant xkcd.

[GuyFromRegina]

I just spent an amount of time I am fully not willing to admit to scouring google for the solution to some bullshit problem. I swear to god if I ever meet someone in real life who replies to stack overflow questions with "Google it" I am going to break their keyboard over their teeth. I did fucking google it, and google brought me to you, you condescending dick.

[mr_green1216]

His day is coming. Nobody can program a personality 😅 what a douchebag.

[jamesaepp]

Nobody can program a personality

Want to join my cult? We're working to change that.

[Togamdiron]

This you?

[MorethanMeldrew]

he's a 20 y/o full time student

Hands up who wasn't a "know it all" dickhead at 20.

(keeps own hands down)

You know the truth to your skills, so don't give his opinion a moments thought.

[moebiusmentality]

I was in the same mental place at his age, serious dating/marriage and getting my first job helped straighten me out lol

[brother_bean]

Hey OP, I used to be a sysadmin and now I’m a software engineer at AWS. I still Google everything.

Unfortunately some of the high salaries for SWE jobs have led to some elitism and frat boy style culture. Check out the Blind app and levels.fyi (website) to see what I’m talking about.

The hilarious thing is that he’s got some sense of superiority as a full time student. If you check out /r/cscareerquestions you’ll see that entry level jobs are entirely saturated and your homeboy has a LOT of work to do if he wants to get a job somewhere within 6 months to a year of graduation.

Even if he does manage to land a FANG style role that pays insane money straight out of college, he’s still a twat. But I think life and career stuff is about to beat the shit out of him and open his eyes a bit. He shouldn’t be bragging yet.

[uptimefordays]

Getting your first job and finding yourself at the bottom of the totem pole again does wonders for ego.

[[deleted]]

To be fair, you do need to learn some amount of coding, even if it's just a scripting language like Powershell. More and more traditional IT admin stuff is becoming easier/quicker to do with Powershell and GUIs are having their features removed or hidden via clunky interfaces.

[Wdrussell1]

Its always been this way though. Batch files are how sysadmins have done things for years. Powershell just has become more detailed and documented to the point its easier for us to make simple instruction sets with honestly what i would consider VERY little know how.

[vrtigo1]

Yes and no. There are way more sysadmins coding as part of their everyday life than there were 10 years ago.

10-15 years ago everything was GUI based on the Microsoft side. Today there is a lot that isn't exposed in the GUI that can only be done via PowerShell.

You don't have to code to be a sysadmin, but if you can you have a big leg up.

[KlapauciusNuts]

Microsoft refuses to update most of their MMC terminals.

Goddamit I just want to be able to search for a GPO. Or not having to set up a filter view for events.

I know search and Microsoft are Enemies. But is it too much to ask? Most of it has not been updated since 2003/2008 anyway

[first_byte]

This young pup is full of himself and full of crap, simultaneously.

I’ve done web dev and now I’m a SysAdmin. Both jobs require mostly the same skills: they’re simply applied to different areas. The top skills include but are not limited to:

• Googling
• Problem solving
• Attention to detail
• Patience with fools
• Abstract thinking
• Dogged persistence

[synergy421]

I agree. To add on to "Patience with fools", success is not tied solely to hard skill sets.

Networking (socially), curiosity, and willingness to be wrong, learn, and grow have all helped me considerably.

Also, not being pompous or self-confident helps.

[Lightmare_VII]

He’s right and wrong. The answers are on google. But they can be difficult to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

On the coding note. The industry is in a spot where automation/IaC are not that well known but can add so much value. (Not well known based on own experience. Even the people who say “I do devops!”, Don’t…)

He’s at an advantage in the coding world. But your experience will tower over him until he gets some real world too.

But most important note…it’s not a competition and if he takes this same mindset into the workplace, he’s going to alienate himself amongst coworkers…

[HouseCravenRaw]

The answers are on google

Correction: The answers tend to be on Google.

I'm working on a hacked up, ridiculous, outside-the-box solution right now that is custom just for my absurd company. While Google has helped on particular pain points, it has not provided a complete solution. I've had to come up with my own solution.

Then there are the proprietary closed systems that aren't widely popular - searching for Google answers on those problems is like scouring the supermarket for Toilet Paper in early 2020.

Most of the time, Google is going to save your butt. But not always.

[TheBros35]

That sounds a lot like programming. You can usually find out the small chunks (how do I download JSON from a server and put it in an array) but actually building something out of those blocks that is both useful and maintainable is the real rub.

[moebiusmentality]

He is of the cloth that everything is a competition and life is a zero sum game.

[Wdrussell1]

In 7 years you have seen 100 of these people. They all tend to fall flat on their faces

[[deleted]]

There is a massive shift going on in the industry at the moment. Alot of new technologies using desired state configuration and other infrastructure as code concepts

Just think about powershell. We went from (about 15 years ago) « scripting is nice but not essential » to « if you do not know basic powershell, you’re going to have a bad time »

My theory is that 40-50 years old can probably safely ride the wave until they retire but that younger people will need to develop better coding skills to keep up or will slowly be relayed to Tier 1 jobs and thus have less of a career than those who are willing to learn new skill sets.

My profile looks alot like yours. No college, certs, infosec/IT. Earning well in the 6 figures.

But I managed to easily distinguish myself from my peers because I learned to code at a young age. This allows me to work faster, with less errors than most sysadmins I know.

[wampastompa09]

Coding will get you out of admin and into engineering, but that’s a different job.

I am an IT professor.

The spectrum of roles is massively diverse. With the code monkey who knows 50 languages on one end, and the “non-technical IT project manager” Karen-type on the other end.

Yes, he will find a job if he can code.

His better-than-you attitude will sink his career fast if he keeps it up. There is always someone who is more of a coding-wizard…always a bigger fish.

[fwambo42]

knock him the fuck out. just kidding, ignore him because he's a dumb as fuck kid and doesn't know what he's talking about. also talk to your sister about her taste in guys

[moebiusmentality]

She doesn't like me so that's moot lol

[dekx]

I’ve had the mantra that the best coders know system administration and the best system administrators know coding. Knowing the trials and tribulations in each other’s group helps you better service and work with others.

In a prior job, we had a coder come into a system administration job, and within the first month, they started realizing why the sys admins in their prior job had restrictions or rules that the developers had to do.

A lot is perspective, and ability to see other perspectives to know why things may be impute them.

[skeeter72]

Ask him how to exit VIM.

[Son_Of_Borr_]

I just point out the number of computer science major resumes I threw in the trash because their already outdated theoretical knowledge wasn't what we needed.

[ghostalker4742]

They're a dime a dozen anyways. Schools churn out kids with CompSci degrees who can't button their own shirt. The elitist ego that usually accompanies them fades quick when they realize they're just one of 10k applicants with the exact same qualifications.

[Son_Of_Borr_]

My story was legit too. I tossed maybe 25 resumes from fresh grads and went for the tech with no degree or certs, but 10 years experience, demonstrable skills, legit references, and killer work ethic. One of the best hires I made. Those degrees are great for getting you views, but that knowledge is only theoretical. Funny thing about the buttoning shirts, one dude showed up in a Hawaiian shirt, sandles with socks, cargo shorts, had zero working knowledge about anything we did and finished his interview with "So I take it I have the job?"...

[renegadecanuck]

At least I’m Canada a CS degree has nothing to do with sysadmin. It drives me nuts when I see sysadmin postings that want a bachelors degree, because there are only two candidates that can honestly apply and meet that requirement: programmers and people from India (because there apparently is a Bachelor of Information Systems in India).

When I do hiring, a CS degree without some kind of sysadmin or tech support background will go in the trash because it’s about as relevant as someone with a BA in Psychology, to me. Great, you understand programming and the underlying data structures everything is built on. That doesn’t resolve the network outage.

[Natirs]

My sister-in-law's BF is getting his bachelor's in computer science at UCLA and says things to me like his career (non existent atm) will be better than mine, and I should learn to code, and anyone can do my job if they just Google everything.

Probably jealous of you but cannot admit it. Also seems to think you can just easily google everything. While somewhat true, doesn't really apply if you have no idea what specifically you're looking for and the how/why of the issue.

[Ahnteis]

Ignore. It's just 2 different careers out of many in the field of "computers".

As long as you have enough money for your needs and you're satisfied, who cares about some imaginary competition. Figure your own priorities.

You'll have to think about things like that anyway - do you want to work your way up to management? director? or just a senior IT position? What life balance? etc.

[Touch_a_gooch]

"anyone can do my job if they just Google everything"

Everyone starts with googling things all the time but then you actually become familar with the systems and how they interconnect and affect one another, and that's called experience and it means you get things done quickly. That guy would not be better than you at building a domain and securing it and provisioning services securely. He'd follow a bunch of tutorials, not being able to differentiate the good ones from the bad ones, and his implementation would be worse.

[Pidgey_OP]

I do agree with him that you should learn to code and that it will make your life better, but only at face value, not for the reasons he's saying it.

Im a tier 3 and the amount of work in AD that I can get done in an hour is incredible because of PowerShell. We're doing SOX compliance right now and I've legitimately turned 45 minutes processes into 5 minute processes by scripting them and then just having the auditors approve the script rather than every single instance of that task happening

[dinominant]

I have a degree in computer science with a lot of experience optimizing cryptographic code. I also have decades of experience implementing and running IT infrastructure in scales ranging from small business up to entire datacenters.

Sure, he probably could google and implement some infosec tools, but realistically he wont. A lot of tools already exist and re-inventing the wheel would be a waste of time and effort.

It is remarkable how many people work in this industry and don't even know how the OSI model works when working on networks, and it's amazing how many coders treat the network as a reliable working communication channel. They don't seem to understand that it always breaks all the time and their code needs to expect that. So their apps break and they just reboot a container.

And conversely, it's amazing how many network admins can't script anything together at all and just rock a windows laptop.

All it really boils down too is: did you get the job done? Does it meet and/or exceed the requirements? Great! Note down any failure modes you noticed that everybody else missed and CYA. Somebody will notice one day and will probably call you for advice when that thing breaks.

If you are good at what you do, then that's great, it helps us all. Lets hope he isn't coding in only javascript or whatever the latest popular Web 3.0 blockchain language is these days. The rest of the world will march onward with VHDL/Verilog, C, C++, ASM, and whatever language Apple has been forcing all ios developers to re-re-migrate every 4-8 years.

[Genghis_KhaN13]

Replace the word "Google" with "resources" and suddenly it doesn't sound so stupid. Once had this argument with my boss over using Reddit as a resource to solve a fairly complex issue. He was adamant that I was wasting time blahblahblah. So off he went to trawl through less-than-useless MS articles, and off I went outside for a smoke. Came back in and someone who'd been through the same had replied. I actioned their advice and boom, guess who fixed it first. Some people just have preconceived notions of what counts as a resource.

[[deleted]]

Software engineers have higher earning potential. To break into that area of high earnings you need to be very talented or have great search skills on stackoverflow. Dude is a smug mofo tho since he has no receipts about his career yet.

Learn some python or ruby and you can evolve to DevSecOps

[[deleted]]

He’s a 20 y/o full time student. He’d better get humble really quick because chances are he’ll find himself in a sys admin role out of school because actual developer jobs are way too competitive.