That's the problem. Yes, I'm the old man yelling at cloud, but indeed 'kids this days' don't know Linux, they know how to provision things from Terraform. In fact it feels like logging in via ssh and checking process with with `strace` is a lost art. Checking PCAP? That's a black magic!
This is the elephant in the room: all "new" technology isn't fundamentally new. Terraform is just curl with state management for lots of different websites, Andible is just a YAML to Bash converter, and so on. If you have good fundamentals, not only are these things easy, they're also incredibly frustrating, because you can easily see their limitations. You can always tell how experienced someone is by how well they know what a given tool is actually doing under the hood. People who exhibit shock and awe will just mess up your codebase, because they have no clue how the machine actually works.
No, I want to hire the grumpy, cynical greybeards, because they know their fundamentals, and they're immune to shiny bullshit.
There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!" And yet, we have threads like this, where we find out, SHOCKER, that the best codebases are the ones maintained by like... four senior developers, half of whom contributed to several Internet RFCs, and half of whom used to work at Bell Labs.
> There's no substitute for skill and experience, despite what the modern tech discourse says. "Anyone can program!"
I’m told this is gatekeeping. Yes, and…? I’ve always found it amusing that I see little to no anger being directed at kernel devs for their gatekeeping. Almost as if deep down, people know that they shouldn’t be fucking with the thing that runs the world unless they are actually good at it. Or maybe they’re just afraid of Torvalds.
I agree that "gatekeeping" gets a bad rap. Sure, it can be taken too far. But at the end of the day, one needs to actually be qualified. And if they aren't, well sorry but you aren't good enough for the job. It doesn't make you a bad person, it just means you need to work on your skills before you're a fit.
Right. I don’t apply to jobs that cite a need for a decade of experience with data center-scale networking, for example, because I don’t have that. Not even close. I don’t view that as gatekeeping, it’s wanting people to be able to quickly ramp up to whatever quirks the environment has, without needing to learn fundamentals of the craft first.
Ansible is a lot more than just "YAML to Bash". For instance, Bash scripts are not idempotent. Ansible playbooks are. Sure, you can hack together a way to ssh and run commands very easily but it will break at some point
Ansible playbooks are as idempotent as bash scripts.
You need to include checks when writing them so they actually are idempotent, just like with bash script, and they happily leak idempotency-breaking details like "restarting a service" works only if a) service currently runs b) because "restart" is a command, not expected state of "the service was restarted and is now running
I think this comment is a bit unfair. A lot of work goes into not having to do those things. Good immutability often means less need for babying a specific server.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do those things, so yes it’s becoming a lost art to me. However, on the rare occasion I need this sort of insight I do fine with JIT research.
It’s the logical outcome for most when you don’t grow up being told to RTFM, you’ve never had to recompile a kernel to get an expansion card to work, and you’ve never touched hardware.
