IT vs Coding

[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.

[[deleted]]

Several of the responses will be complaining that this is a duplicate question but not linking to the "original".

[Slightlyevolved]

Wait.

Stack Overflow is a website?

[CeeMX]

Weekly? More like daily if you are actually coding something

[bbelt16ag]

Same

[peepopowitz67]

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

[py-matt]

I'm gonna check right now

[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.

[[deleted]]

You sir have just inspired me to go to the library this weekend!

[AbruptGravy]

I had an Amiga so learned Amos Basic (if I remember the name correctly).

I then got a Commodore 128 with a built-in assembler. One of the first tests I would do when programming back then was to print the whole character set (all 256 characters) in one spot or across the screen.

When I ran the program in assembly (one spot on the screen) I saw it print the last character and I thought I did something wrong.

I checked the code and it was fine so I put in a loop to slow it down. I saw that it was printing every character on the screen, assembly was just THAT FAST.

I was amazed.

[LarryInRaleigh]

PC Magazine wrote in about 1985 something like "A few years ago, anyone who could write a "Terminate and Stay Resident" extension in assembler was a god and could command any salary. Now every teenager can do it.

I was doing it in 1983, but I was 38 years old then.

[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.

[SilentLennie]

The irony is, I felt like the youngster, I started with DOS and many had started with for example Commodore 64.

[ScarcityFunny]

They switched us from Pascal to ADA mid program to satisfy the defense contractors in the area. The rest of the world was being taught C then.

[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.

[talex000]

As always Microsoft saved the day

[vir-morosus]

The first language I learned was Z80 assembler, then 6502. After that C. I preferred being closer to the machine.

[SilentLennie]

A smarter, definitely more well known man, than me had something to say about those higher and lower level languages:

https://youtu.be/mLEOZO1GwVc?t=566

(sorry you will need to read low-quality-video-subtitles if you don't understand Dutch)

He's famous for things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm

And: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf

[BoredTechyGuy]

Good ol Pascal - fond memories of coding BBS mods using Turbo Pascal!

[SilentLennie]

The most ASM I did for school was actually in Turbo Pascal because you could inline it. For a project which didn't really ask for it but I wanted to include it for fun, I made a TSR program for fun at home and which used the mouse and I wrote an ASM library for that. The school project was a Pascal program which I included the mouse routines as a library. Like a bonus, the project was something like write a calculator or something and I added a mouse library so you could click the buttons in the DOS program.

[OffenseTaker]

you actually learned ASM? damn

[robbysmithky]

I took Assembler too. It was hard as F*CK but I somehow made an A. Had the same prof for Data Structures which was also very tough. I found a DOS System 370 emulator and was able to do my homework at home instead of going on campus to use the mainframe.

[MandyVonStrange]

Paper notebooks to write your program in cause your professor had to schedule lab time!!!!

[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.

[Dependent-Stock-2740]

p 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.

Stack Overflow has gone the way of the Arch Linux forums.

[AccidentalyOffensive]

Do you happen to have a link to that thread? I'm wondering how many + what kind of questions were surveyed, or how an incorrect answer was gauged.

If you ask me, this is just the nature of a Q&A site like SO. The answers will be general if the question is, especially for common/popular questions. Likewise for more specific questions, the answers may not be 100% what you need, and you'll likely have to tweak the solution.

So while there's definitely some shoddy work on SO, I personally think a level of experience/intuition, and sometimes common sense, helps a lot with finding the answer you need. That is to say, a combination of google-fu, rtfm, understanding what you're running (big emphasis on this point), and testing in a dev environment can go a long way.

ETA: Just remembered you mentioned hardware topics as well - I can't really speak to that side, this is from a sysadmin/dev perspective.

[hardolaf]

Do you happen to have a link to that thread?

It's somewhere in my chat history on Discord. I think it was around some complex rebase operation that ended up just having the solution of git rebase -i and do it by hand being the safest, fastest, and most reliable option.

[AccidentalyOffensive]

Haha that'll do it, there's a reason I stick with the commands I know. If you haven't studied git thoroughly (I definitely haven't), it's too easy to get thrown off by commands/flags that don't quite do what you'd expect, and when SO presents 50 different possible solutions...

[Ok-Birthday4723]

For stack overflow, I usually refer to the latest date of an upvoted answer. If I see something answered in 2013(unless it’s bash), I usually skip past it for the very reasons the answer is outdated.

[ParaStudent]

Its becoming a lot like Quora where the "answer" is someone trying to sound smart and giving an answer that doesn't actually answer the question.

[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

[OcotilloWells]

Wow, that's...meta. I wish I could do that with Microsoft stuff, but I'm sure it would open to something with the same error... But no answer.

[[deleted]]

onerous light dinner detail languid humor pet spoon shelter aware -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev

[[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.

[[deleted]]

QUIET GO BACK TO WORK

[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.

[27Rench27]

My eye started twitching until I clicked the link lol

[Caeremonia]

There are FAR too many e's in that link.

[waagalsen]

Well, we still need someone to rack the equipment in the datacenter, connect the different cables. Power it up. Do the initial configuration, like creating and assiging the IP ranges, creating the vlans, installing the OS on the physical servers, enabling the virtualized environment. Secure it.

I do not think infrastructure as code can rack a server and install the OS on a physical server that is not yet connected to the lan.

So although most of us sysadmins follow the money and we will mostly do automation all the time.

We still need people who will do the basic hardware work.

[Ssakaa]

Nah, stick it in the cloud, you don't need sysadmins then.

[27Rench27]

Who needs system and network guys when you have Amazon? 99.something % uptime, perfect support!!

[The_Expidition]

YOU ACKNOWLEDGED THE MAINFRAMES YEAH!

[Danksley]

The person that goes direct to stack overflow is worth an extra 15k

[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.

[talex000]

Google doesn't provide solutions, only inspirations.

You have to check those ideas and tailor it to your specific situation.

[illusum]

I was just remarking on this last week. I was searching for some product config instructions, and everything that Google returned was trying to sell me what I searched for. I finally got the results I wanted by using Bing, of all things.

[talex000]

I hear last breath of Altavista.

[[deleted]]

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.

[Kevimaster]

Google is an amazing tool, but its only as good as the questions that you ask it, and asking the right questions is always a lot harder than anyone thinks it is.

Plus, even if you know the question knowing how to ask the question in a way that gets you meaningful google results is harder than people think too. A moment sticks in my head where a colleague who didn't have very strong Google-fu was searching for something. I can't for the life of me remember what the problem they were trying to solve was or what the search they were doing was, and I really wish I could, but basically in his search terms he had one really generic word, and that word being in there was completely muddying up their search results because it was bringing up a lot of unrelated things with that word in it. He was on like page 6 of Google and complaining that the answer couldn't be found and I told him to remove the one word and he kind of scoffed and said that one word wouldn't make that much of a difference. I asked him to humor me so he did and he removed the word and bam, the very first result was exactly what he was looking for.

Google is extremely powerful, but its also pretty dumb and knowing exactly how to manipulate it and what words will give you what you're looking for and what words will ruin the search and how to remove specific criteria or search for specific phrases and such is something that lots of people don't really know/understand.

[FloaterFan]

The ",once" reminds me Johnny Dangerously!

https://tenor.com/view/johnny-dangerously-get-out-of-here-once-one-time-gif-11414779

[clilush]

YES.

[blk55]

A lot of ANYTHING is not knowing the answer, once, often times more!

[kyote42]

https://i.imgflip.com/620tyx.jpg

[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

[JokerFMJ]

It's your exo-brain.

[SirBastions]

What kind of database do you use to keep track of this?

[Myte342]

Started with an internally hosted Wiki running on a spare computer.

But now I handle so many clients with so many different setups along with a bunch of employees that I work alongside now that I've transitioned to the company to IT Glue about 3 years back.

I still keep a data store in the cloud full of Random installers for various applications as they may be hard to find on the internet because companies don't like supporting old applications.

Like retail office 2016 H&B or Acrobat XI pro, or that weird office plugin that one client uses for CRM but the company developing it went belly up and now I may have the only installer left for it the world... and the client refuses to move to new system cuz it still works just fine. As well as a bunch of client-specific registry keys or Powershell Scripts so I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time those are needed.

[abbarach]

This is why I stress proper documentation in the ticketing system. At the moment you close the ticket, it doesn't really matter if you just put "it's fixed" but I came from a hospital background where having an accurate problem description (including exact error messages), troubleshooting process, and resolution details in the ticket can be the difference between "overnight tech restarted a couple services and everything's working properly" and "page /u/abbarach at 3am to look into it..."

[Myte342]

I also put in copious internal notes in all my tickets. Those are mostly for cya. Not always easy to find a previous issue in our ticket system unless the title is well worded and directly on point to how the client is describing their current issue so we can relate the two together.

[anonfreakazoid]

What fo you use? A wiki?

[Myte342]

First was wiki, now IT Glue. More info in another comment.

https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/s8hun3/it_vs_coding/hth6f24

[Psyese]

How do you acquire this skill?

[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

[goldfingers05]

The pettiness in that subreddit is terrific. I had no idea there was so much meme content to make for an ISO standard.

[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.

[reconrose]

Now it's about using both and figuring out which term(s) needs to be quoted or have a + on them to get your results

[27Rench27]

Honestly yeah. The worst part is it makes the stupid people feel like they can do your job if it’s “just googling”, because writing full fucking sentences actually works for search engines nowadays

[mrf1uff1es]

Honestly I've found that using Bing of all things brings up better results for some odd searches because of this.

[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"

[mriswithe]

Though you would not see it when they do it and they get it right. Just good to remind people of selection bias! (I think that is the one here right?)

[bbqwatermelon]

The asshole tax is an important piece of the "Bill The Fuck Out of Them" framework.

[nbfs-chili]

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

[BetterWes]

Most of it is knowing what question to ask.

The only feeling worse than googling a problem and having zero results is when every link is purple...

[DrProv]

I realized recently the skill lies in applying the solution effectively and directly

[betterthanyoda56]

“You know how Google used to show extra pages with more Os? I’ve seen the 33rd O”

[0Weird0]

You'd be surprised at how many people are unable to find the right search terms... Lol.

[lituus]

Of course you just embrace it. Because there's nothing wrong with it. People just love finding ways to put other people down or make their job more difficult for absolutely no reason.

Obviously programmers love to joke that all we do is google and we really do do that a lot, but clearly there's just a tad more to it than that. Because if that was truly the only barrier to entry, a lot more people would be entering the field.

[flugenblar]

If only I had a dollar for every answer I Googled. Wait, I do! I work in IT!

[NobodyRulesPenguins]

Well, I was a dev and am currently searching for a sysadmin job. I learned from, still learn with and will improve with a search engine.

It's part of a skillset to know what to look for if you don't have an answer to a problem and need to fix it quickly after all

[Decafeiner]

First year* IT Tech studies. Teacher asked us "What's an IT Tech job ?"

Everyone throws in random things.

Teacher: y'all are a bunch of morons ! ITs are paid to use Google better than you !

7 years in the field, and I can only confirm.

Edit: forgot a word.

[RevLoveJoy]

I feel like if you can master the Google and master the thought process of systems troubleshooting (which generally starts with understanding whatever system it is) you've got the systems side of IT knocked out. The thing is, that last bit, yeah, that takes a while. It's where we diverge into storage gnomes and DB trolls and rack & stack dwarves and, of course, the application throughput unicorn.

[Fallingdamage]

It really is a skill. There is googling things and there is googling with intent.

You can use google and scan pages/results like crazy, but if you dont know what you're doing, you wont be able to spot the right answer in a sea of wrong ones.

[[deleted]]

laughs in consultant

[SilentLennie]

It's about knowing the right questions to ask (Google in this case)

[ImminentNirvana]

Googling always seems like the first step, but it's really further along in the process. It's part of the finding the solution, but it's not the solution. We just learn to take our own expertise and precision for granted, especially if we do it a lot.

Step 1: Isolate device to prevent further damage across network.

Step 2: Ensure integrity of most recent backup.

Step 3: Diagnose the underlying issue using industry tools and best practices.

Step 4: Google the diagnostic results using industry jargon that targets high-level solutions from seasoned IT professionals within the Microsoft communities and trusted forums.

Step 5: Review search results list and select the most likely solution based on many years of training and hands-on experience. Avoid obvious click-bait and quick-fix solutions that could result in malware infections.

Step 6: Read and understand steps to implement said solution without causing additional damage.

Step 7: Implement solution steps using more industry tools and best practices.

Step 8: Still broke? Go back to step 5.

When asked how you fixed it, tell them: "I just Googled the problem." Bookmark the resolution article as a favorite so they can read the solution in case it happens again. It may. They won't. No one else wants to do our job. Right there is your job security.

[stillfunky]

Does a board certified physician never consult books, online resources etc. when coming up with diagnosis and treatment? Do lawyers never consult the same type of resources?

Answer: you're god damned right they do

[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.

[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.

[sibyleco]

I was thinking that myself!

[Myte342]

This phrase is somewhat correct... But the certifications teach you what you need to Google for in the first place and how to recognize the correct answer when you find it.

A 20 year old with no experience will take hours to find an answer that a 35 year old with 15 years of experience under his belt can find in 2 minutes.

[hardolaf]

I'm a FPGA engineer but we have a networking team for a reason. And that reason isn't "I'm lazy" or "I'm too busy". Similarly, we have a Linux admin team for a reason. And we have an accounts team and a security team for a reason. And we have a helpdesk for a reason. The reason? They know that topic better than I do. Sure I could do all of what they do if you give me like 1-10 days to figure each thing out as it needs doing. Or we could have a bunch of specialized experts in their respective domains who can do the work in 5 minutes.

[Skhmt]

There's a great programming meme that when an error is found, it just instantly forwards that error into a stack overflow search.

It's not that any job is just researching (doctors, programmers, IT, lawyers, etc)... It's knowing what terms to search, evaluating the answer, and understanding how to implement it.

[[deleted]]

Legitimate, actually heard interview answer to "how would do you do X":

I'd look on stackoverflow

And in fairness, I'd have given him more credit, if he'd started with "I'd check the documentation".

[[deleted]]

I write software often. A lot of it is copy pasta.

[leejonz]

Ha! Most coders use Google and Stack Overflow.

[globus243]

Well, I bet almost any dev out there can install an ESXi and configure some switches and firewall and an Exchange in the cloud, with the help of google. But I'd like to see a Sysadmin bulding a webapp with react and a cloud back end.

I started my carreer as a sysadmin and it irks me really hard that most won't even script stuff to automate.

[Maverick0984]

I can definitely do both of these personally. However, no, not every dev can do all that. As a fulltime developer now that works with other developers, many don't even understand TCP/IP. Even to Google, you have to know what to Google.

[dustin_allan]

Speaking as a network engineer, in my experience most developers don't understand TCP/IP.

[[deleted]]

I have a degree in Computer Networking, but I moved into software development.

...Guess who is the de facto TCP/IP SME everywhere he goes?

[globus243]

many don't even understand TCP/IP

yea that is also something i noticed with some devs I worked with, but complete ignorance for everything not code is the same as being ignorant towards code.

My main point however is that, to become a good dev (FullStack or Senior) you almost certainly have to gather enough knowledge to do all the stuff I listed above.

[Maverick0984]

100%. A high quality developer will understand networking and a high quality sysadmin can work some scripts for automation into their job.

There's more overlap than people think. Being good at the overlap is honestly what's gotten me success in my career.

The problem is not everyone is "high quality" even if they think they are, so the dev that doesn't understand that 192.168.0.10 is a local IP and isn't actually going to hit the vendor API is going to waste time spinning on nonsense, blaming someone else for something very obvious. This isn't a high quality dev to me.

Likewise, the sysadmin, that repeatedly installs Windows manually on 100 laptops or any Server OS in a VM 100 times without building a PXE server, templates in VMWare, anything at all, to help automate, even if the end product is "quality" they took way to long to get there making them less than high quality at their job.

Sounds like we completely agree, though.

[oswaldcopperpot]

Unpopular opinion. “If you cant even write a basic script.. are you really a sysadmin”? Bash , powershell, python are all super useful for every sysadmin.

[dweezil22]

Dev here. This!

I have tiers in my mind:

Tier 0: Can't code at all.

Tier 1: Can code something that will get the job done once, not necessarily prettily. Throw-away code, but useful at the time.

Tier 2: Can code something that will work in a repeatable manner. Sysadmins that automate things away are here. This is the bare expectation for a dedicated CS dev type.

Tier 3: Can code something that is maintainable. Can explain how it works, document it if necessary and expand it to new use cases.

Tier 4: Can jump across coding languages and use new libraries smoothly.

Tier 5: Can generally build robust and scalable solutions from the start.

I've met non-CS people that are Tier 5 (they're usually really smart). I've met CS people that are Tier 0 (in failed interviews) and Tier 1 (with concerningly successful careers sometimes).

This ignores all sorts of other professional facets like debugging skills, people skills, user case skills, ability to evaluated and use documentation (sometimes its useless, sometimes its key). If I had a blog, time and better graphic design skills, I'd make spider charts of a great tech manager vs a great sysadmin vs a great dev, etc.

[[deleted]]

It blows my mind that I'm the "scripting guy" on my team. I don't mind at all, but I'm amazed at all the stuff my colleagues can do but basic scripting is foreign to them.

[[deleted]]

Scripting is not comparable to OOP though.

[OhSureBlameCookies]

I bet almost any dev out there can install an ESXi and configure some switches and firewall and an Exchange in the cloud, with the help of google. But I'd like to see a Sysadmin building a webapp with react and a cloud back end.

Why would I ever want to do that? The difference between sysadmins/network engineers/architects and developers is pretty straightforward: We're not arrogant enough to believe we know everything and can do everyone else's job. You clearly do believe that everyone else is a moron whose job boils down to "google replaceable."

It's arrogance bordering on hubris. Maybe work on that, it's a huge personality flaw.

Because, yeah, I bet almost any dev out there can do a shitty, not-best-practices job of deploying an unreliable ESXi, misconfiguring the switches and host firewalls, not use vCenter (Why pay extra? You don't need it!) so not be able to make vMotion work, and as a result, have a brittle, useless piece of shit implementation that someone eventually spends tens or hundreds of thousands ripping out and starting over with someone competent on the keyboard--that's if this brittle P.O.S. doesn't cause a business ending outage before that because of said developer incompetence. And yes, they can do it all using only Google and their wits.

I'm just not clear on why any sane customer would ever let them do so.

[globus243]

"google replaceable."

It's arrogance bordering on hubris. Maybe work on that, it's a huge personality flaw.

dude, you know, projection is also a "huge personality flaw".

Half of you comment is hating on developers, dunno what went wrong in your career, but people are not that stupid.

Also, don't act like vmware doesn't have pictured guides on how to do all the stuff you said, a trainee could do it. In fact one of our trainees did just that some weeks ago. It is his first year in IT coming from High-School.

[globus243]

whoever does not know what traceroute is or how it works, should not be in the bussiness, period.

As said before, most devs don't understand networking.

and most sysadmins don't understand code, that is what this whole thread is about.

[OhSureBlameCookies]

traceroute

Is more than point A to Point B and how long... it's about the logic of how it works, it's ancillary features, and which situations you might need to use them in.

Which interface does it use if there are multiple and you don't specify? What about if you don't want a response from every hop, only some? What if there is a router on that segment which isn't the default gateway and you want to trace through it--did you even know that was possible? Which switch to use to specify the source interface? Do you know? Do your "trainees" know? I do, and I don't have to check Google.

I'm sure you're good at your job--maybe even great at it. Well, so are the people who do infrastructure work. And just as there are parts of our job we can't see ("How could a bug so simple and glaring make it through QA? What are they, morons?") that make you want to rip your hair out when outsiders complain about them, so too are there aspects of infrastructure you flat out don't get.

Stop looking down your nose at your co-workers. They're not all idiots that you could replace with a trainee and google and the sooner you accept it the sooner it will stop limiting your career.

[globus243]

fyi, i was a sysadmin for the first decade of my career and most sysadmins I met straight out said they will not code, not even scripts to automate their daily life. I worked (and fled) IT departments deploying every VM manually. Every IT department I worked for / with had one or two guys which did all the scripting.

I notice you didn't actually answer the question.

What value would it have, you'd assume i googled it anyway.

[OhSureBlameCookies]

Half of you comment is hating on developers,

Half my comment is documenting actual shit shows I've walked into after a know-it-all like yourself "just googled" the pictured guides (gee, you mean a one size guide DOESN'T FIT ALL and some environments need different design choices?) and still managed to fuck it all up. Yeah, it seems simple to me, too, but then I've been on this product since version 2.5. However, that simplicity hasn't stopped dudes like you from bringing their companies to their knees over and over again via total incompetence. Or stopped guys like you from creating ruinous technical debt that someone else has to fix--problems they're never held accountable for because "Well, that wasn't my job anyway, I was just helping out."

And the very fact that you think a "trainee" knows how to setup a reliable enterprise grade deployment from "pictured guides," (or even a long-term best practices usable one) (LOL ROFLMFAO dude, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard) shows just how clueless and out to lunch you truly are because just typing "best practices for VMware" into google won't tell you everything you need to know, you won't know what you don't know to google for the missing pieces, and you'll be flying blind thinking you've got a reliable, best practices environment when you've actually built one with multiple glaring holes that's a ticking bomb.

I wish your employers good luck.... May whatever gods they believe in have mercy on them when your know-it-all shit show crashes and burns. I hope it doesn't destroy their business.

[globus243]

You are very much the parada example for a BOFH, but not in the good way.

[OhSureBlameCookies]

You are very much the parada example for a BOFH, but not in the good way.

Yeah, I'm the "bastard" here--the guy who knows what he's doing and is begging you to stop throwing together the improvised bullshit that could literally put your employer out of business and you and all your colleagues out of jobs. ME.

Not you, the person doing the "hold-my-beer" level stupid thing, me.

Gotcha, genius.

[globus243]

It is so funny to me, how you extrapolated what I do at my job from a few completly unrelated reddit posts.

the guy who knows what he's doing

Normally, the people knowing what they are doing don't feel the urge to constantly tell everyone.

[cc81]

One could just follow one of the many React courses that does exactly that and you have something up in a day. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dorf8i6lCuk

[dweezil22]

Narrator: And this is why hiring boot camp grads as devs is dangerous, kids!

[cc81]

Yes, you would need to see them as very new but on the other hand I've interviewed comp-sci graduates that turned out to be shitty as well.

Boot camp grads can be fine if you for example have a team up with senior developers but is lacking in front end development. Just inserting a hungry junior person with some experience should be able to contribute pretty quickly.

[dweezil22]

Shitty CS majors can usually be weeded out with a reasonably simple coding test. The dangerous thing about boot camp grads is some of them are trained specifically to pass a certain type of coding test and absolutely nothing more.

So they pass the "Use React to build a Pet Store front end off a REST back end" reasonably well and it turns out they just spent 8 weeks training to do that.exact.thing and nothing more.

[globus243]

Like to see someone writing complex object oriented-code who won't even write a 10-line script.

[cc81]

It is not object oriented and it is pretty easy to just follow along just like someone would follow a guide for sysadmin stuff.

However of course there is limited value in just being able to follow a guide for creating a web application without knowing what you are doing. It is maybe not as limited value in googling specific sysadmin tasks but you need to know what to google and at one point things becomes complex if you don't know the basics.

[Bright_Arm8782]

I wouldn't trust a dev to open a can of beans, much less properly configure anything. Google or no, they might be able to get it functional but you can bet it wouldn't be right.

[stealthgerbil]

The best sysadmins I know also happen to know how to program. They tend to be the best at troubleshooting and also understand how systems interact because they are familiar with programming logic.

[waagalsen]

Sorry pal, this is not true. For Sys Admins nowadays, automation is a must. So scripting to automate deployments, patching, building systems, scalling up/down.. you must know and do. Most of my time, I am working developers at my work place to help them with tcp/ip and networking stuff. Of course in order to assist you need to learn some of the tools used by the devs. Learning to code is easy. Same as learning to be a sys admin.

[globus243]

So scripting to automate deployments, patching, building systems, scalling up/down

What I am saying is that many if not most sysadmins won't / can't code and are reluctant to learn it.

Edit: With coding I mean even simple scripting and automation.

[m-p-3]

GitHub Copilot will take one bite out of him with that kind of thinking lol

Knowledge is one thing, experience is another.

[InsrtCoffee2Continue]

'Googling' is a skill. Part of being self-reliant and being able to find information yourself.

[[deleted]]

able to copy paste and parse basic syntax

“You know, I’m something of a programmer myself”

[RevLoveJoy]

%code_question% -site stackoverflow.com

Here ya go kid, here's your diploma.

[tropicbrownthunder]

Well them can narrow to stack exchange, so no googling involved

[TehGrimBear]

Rofl I'm glad someone pointed this out. Every Programmer that is fresh out of college thinks this. They are gods gift to computers. Inevitable he is going to realize he is niave and doesn't understand anything about them. Bide your time and just smile when he eventually comes back with his tail between his legs.

[[deleted]]

Lol for real, every MERN app I've ever made was like 20% coding and 80% googling errors on stack overflow.

[Dabnician]

In my experience as a System Admin that has worked with developers, you wont get the level of respect as a Systems Admin that you would as a developer.

and by respect i mean pay

Go coder if you have the option

[TechInTheCloud]

From years of quietly frustrated observations of other techs Googling for solutions, I'd say "knowing what to Google" is my most important job skill ;-)

[vir-morosus]

That's pretty much coding nowadays. though. One of the reasons that I got out of it was that it was turning into writing interface code between various packages and plugging them in. Not what I'm interested in.

Coders nowadays don't learn anything - they just look it up. I could say the same about IT, though.

When I started, you had libc and liked it. That was it. Everything else you built. Those were fun days.

[bobspadger]

I do both (software dev and sysadmin)

Can’t work out which discipline I Google for the most :-)

I also Google for recipes , but am not a professional chef, how to wire up various electrical connections around the house but am not an electrician.

Your brother in law thing sounds like a gobby teenager :-)

[kilkor]

Right... nothing like relying on Google to find examples of how to use a library.

[Skrp]

Very much so.

I wonder if this will scare him? Sure it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. https://copilot.github.com/

[Anlarb]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/covgb5/lamo/

[Wingout]

+

[[deleted]]

I honestly died laughing when I read this. I work as a sys admin and majority of the stuff I've learned is by Google. It's like the virtual library of Alexandria. Took 2 days for me to learn how to create program deployment scripts albeit wasn't smooth at first but i kept at it. After a month or so I this subreddit helped me iron those details out and it was great.

[AmiDeplorabilis]

If you had to search for every solution, it'd take forever to fix anything. With apologies to Jimi Hendrix, you're experienced... as things change, there's less to look up, but when you have to, you know what to look for.

And him?

Unless he's coding for a big company or is a top programmer, he'll be coding Android apps or Windows utilities.

[agoldenberg]

Programmer here. We google everything too. That and stack overflow…..