Ah wow, that software engineering has gotten awful article I boosted.

It does not appear as if Vitor is on the FediVerse?

This right here:

"Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth there was a type of professional called a System Administrator. Their whole job was to make sure that your backend was working nicely. They handled infrastructure changes, upgrading the database, system upgrades, keeping the daemon running, restarts, everything. Then came DevOps. Some cash-strapped company somewhere decided that now all of this would be handled by the engineers and everyone agreed."

OK, so I was a SysOp (technically originally a volunteer Co-SysOp; invited by folks who had day jobs at nps.navy.mil and ran BBSes after hours for fun, which is where I came in [though they would invite me to help them work on systems at their day job too on occasion after I had continued to show my chops as being responsible I guess?]; back when "elders" used to mentor juniors into their trade) before I was ever given a job title of "System Administrator" but I have had "Senior System Administrator" as a job title at more than one past employer and, at least personally?

The term DevOps always bugged me!

Who would trust ops to someone who wasn't already a seasoned dev?!

You don't just go handing out root/sudoers/Enterprise Admin/enable/etc. access to people who can't code, do you?

So no, "everyone agreed"?

Absolutely not!

More like, I got burnt out by folks who couldn't take "no" for an answer.

And they decided to take things into their own hands, and we are all suffering more as a result.

Moreover, even when folks wouldn't heed my warnings when things broke, I was the one getting paged at all hours of the day and night to fix things (in others' it.sh more often than not) even pager "rotations" were awful because the primaries would either be too incompetent, or too high or too who knows what, so invariably things would get "escalated" (because it.sh rolls downhill and I am where the buck stops, apparently) to me.

I would be OK, going back to being a lowly sysadmin again.

With the terms that I outlined back in 2007 such as: "no more on call" (that lasted about 3 months before CxOs and management started violating that part of my hiring agreement at one previous employer where I had just been at a previous employer on call 24x7 for 4+ years straight and couldn't handle that BS anymore and the new place, claimed they agreed).

I now no longer keep active SIMs on any of my "mobile" devices, because I cannot be at the beck and call of others anymore.

Even without that, others still nag me way too much and it's thankless work most of the time and underpaid and I am still overworked.

I'd be into unionizing I guess (I'll be 50 later this year and was forced to work [unpaid] as a minor and in my entire career history I have only had one employer where it was even possible for me to join a union. One place I worked, had a union [technically 5 chapters of the same union, but each county had its own chapter and they all negotiated separately and once one of the chapters didn't like their contract renegotiation and went on strike and then all the other chapters went on strike in solidarity and because my job couldn't even be part of the union, I was in the horrible position of crossing a picket line, or get fired; which is not a position I would wish on my worst enemies, especially since I was married and the sole provider for my now ex-wife and our kids.). Or even better: be part of a co-op (I have applied to co-ops, none ever got back to me for an interview. Even run of the mill co-ops such as bakeries and grocery stores gave me the cold shoulder.).

After, all, why enable the technocrat robber barons?

That was never my desire nor objective, even if my skillsets have been abused and misused by such horrible sorts (if I started mentioning a client list, it would get ugly, fast like Fortune 1 ugly. Fortune 13 ugly. Fortune 25 ugly. All of those places have been litigated against, multiple times! At least one is a convicted monopoly. Guess how they treat skilled outside contractors like some of my past employers were to them? Not well! But probably not as horrifically as they treat their own employees?).

I have a B.A. in 言語研究「gengo kenkyū」(Language Studies, focused on Japanese) I dropped my CE/EE double major as an undergrad, because after transferring schools and having a surplus of credits but it being "3 more years for one major or 6 for two" I figured if I was going to be in University for 8 years, I better have a PhD, so something had to go (and even then getting out in 5 years with a B.A. and 3 different schools seemed like it was sub-optimal to understate it, but I also got married and became a parent, so hey? It wasn't all bad [the divorce later was horrible though])

I figured: "well, I have been fixing other people's computers, even at the military postgraduate level, more or less my entire life, even unpaid as a teenager. No doubt, others will still want me to fix their computers after I graduate, but when am I ever going to get to visit Japan? Maybe never [I did, briefly for three weeks circa 1997/1998 at least visit and have never been able to afford to return. Hopefully, eventually?]).

Anyway, I was right: people still expect me to fix their technological issues, even without an engineering degree.

I did once find a part time job at a clothing retailer in SF that was selling clothing from a designer based out of Kyōto in a building that was ostensibly operated as a subsidiary of 株式会社小学館「kabushiki-gaisha shōgakukan」(which published some dictionaries I used as an undergrad) so I almost had a career working for a Japanese firm? Kinda? Sorta? Minimum wage, and they had me doing webdev for their eCommerce site too.

Having written as much, I explicitly avoid misusing the term engineer in my own career, because Old Crow [maybe best known for reverse engineering PSX modchips and coming up with a lower cost PIC re-implementation, even a version which only disabled the region lock out check not the piracy checks, because that's just how honorable Old Crow operates] I consider a friend (see the rant dated 06/17/03: https://www.oldcrows.net/rant.html). Though, I was given a staff badge at REcon.cx (Montreal's Reverse Engineering conference) in 2006 and plan to return for their 20 year anniversary this summer.

But maybe: it's time to stop disrespecting sysadmins?

Maybe?

Please!

Sure, there's Sysadmin Appreciation day, but that's 1 day a year.

For a profession where being on call, 24x7 has burnt years of my working life (and if you do the math that means even my best paid jobs were still below the local minimum hourly wage).

IMHO, if Bill Gates forfeited his entire fortune, that still wouldn't make up for a single second of lost sleep Micro$oft has caused me.

But, do people listen to me?

Not likely!

I dunno about the dinosaurs either, maybe stop denigrating sysadmins as being Mesozoic era relics?

But y'know, I was a (Co)SysOp before I was a SysAdmin. I once worked somewhere with a fellow who had the job title of just "operator", no "sys" at all! (He was an HP3000 operator. The PCBs in that ginormous 16-bit WOPR looking monstrosity that still had a grandfathered HALON fire pre-suppression system were dated a year before I was born, and that "operator" had been working for that employer, longer than I had been alive as well). So yeah, I am getting up there in years, now. But I wasn't even a legal adult when I first got invited into learning that trade. And if these so-called software "engineers" and devs didn't get invites from other SysOps? Then IMHO, they should have taken the hint, and stayed t.f. out of the kitchen; they never leveled up to the demands of the territory.

If they had heeded us:

We would have told them:

"DO NOT USE AWS!"

Instead, folks such as I, have been using emulators and hypervisors long before VMWare even existed (do you remember when Amax II on the Amiga ran Macintosh software, faster and in color and for less money than an Apple Macintosh in black and white? I do! And don't get me started on an EMPLANT board with an MC68060 Amiga) I was kicking the tires on bhyve, before it was merged into FreeBSD base and OpenBSD's vmm gives me much joy in more recent years too (to say nothing of other hypervisors I've used; but again: I would never recommend AWS, when instead I have helped facilitate past employers, and even places where I volunteered my skills with other IT departments, to run their own Xen and KVM virtual machine infrastructure [AWS was historically built upon Xen and later KVM, so y'know, if you want to forgo the brand mark up and go for the libre/free open source "generic" underlying code? It's there for the taking.).

But, if people don't heed people like me?

(And that diatribe on React? I was invited to a React shindig in SF probably before most people had ever heard of it, and I walked out of that experience thinking "holy it.sh this is awful". And was kind of a reminder that the fellow who pointed me out to it at Wicked Grounds, was kind of a raging coke head and maybe not the best person to trust from a technological stance, since he mostly grifted folks by selling them "financial" trading software)

Well, you reap what you sow I guess?

You want Docker?

Still weren't heeding people like me I guess!

Y'know, there are reasons why Apple didn't embrace FreeBSD's jails, even though it took a lot of other stuff from FreeBSD.

I used to work with jkh (Jordan Hubbard, one of the co-founders of FreeBSD and "Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies" at Apple for a dozen some odd years before he was CTO at iXSystems, where he and I worked together). I might have some insights to share!

I mean, I try to!

I don't get too into name dropping, but my parents' church from when I was a kid to this day, still shares a parking lot with SRI. I knew Doug Engelbart and Bill English personally. I was blessed to use advanced computers many maybe only ever read about in a text book, before I took my first formal class in programming when I was six.

And I wasn't a "boy genius" or anything either.

If anything, there's the adage of, "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room" and for whatever reason, I was blessed to be considered a collaborator with others who were so much smarter than I am, it sometimes took me decades to understand how far ahead of the curve they were (really, beyond 1337 anti-wardialing techniques in the 1980s that probably still aren't public knowledge). Contrasted with some of the brilliance I have been around, I am a dunce. But, if anything, I can hopefully at least serve as a cautionary tale to help folks avoid dying on hills which have already seen too much unnecessary blood?

So if being a software engineer has gotten awful?

I can postulate on some reasons why, maybe?

I know I am not the only one being ignored by swaths of "AI" start up it.sh heads (like those college drop outs who just got $2 billion or whatever)?

I could point out how to "follow the money" and why you shouldn't chase it, if you care about preserving things that are vital to existence.

But y'know, maybe the dinosaurs failed to heed some warnings too, and that's why they're extinct and poor bastards such as I are just doomed to watch others' repeat the same histories from which we already learned? ;-/

I don't think it has to be awful.

But it is.

I see Vitor has a GitHub account.

Guess what else poor bastards such as I have been warning people against using, for years?

You don't need to be a sysadmin to know why some things are bad:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/jun/30/give-up-github-launch/

So, it's maybe more a question of:

Why do you think it's OK to ignore sysadmins telling you "no"?

Did you not learn about consent?

No good comes of ignoring people like me.

A lot of evil is being unleashed, as I type this.

Maybe we can't put the genie back in the bottle, but folks such as I, know how to stop the bleeding and triage and mitigate the damage and maybe help more lives survive and ideally, someday get back to thriving.

Or, you could keep ignoring sysadmins?

Even when we tell you "no"?

Seems as if it's a recipe for disaster to me.

#SoftwareEngineer #Awful #AWS #Docker #DevOps #Sysadmin #SysOp #WizOp