System Admins Should Know How To Code

snydeq writes "You don't need to be a programmer, but you'll solve harder problems faster if you can write your own code, writes Paul Venezia. 'The fact is, while we may know several programming languages to varying degrees, most IT ninjas aren't developers, per se. I've put in weeks and months of work on various large coding projects, but that's certainly not how I spend most of my time. Frankly, I don't think I could just write code day in and day out, but when I need to develop a tool to deal with a random problem, I dive right in. ... It's not a vocation, and it's not a clear focus of the job, but it's a substantial weapon when tackling many problems. I'm fairly certain that if all I did was write Perl, I'd go insane.'"

Comments

Very true, for many reasons.

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

People who've never coded tend to have many "magic boxes" in their thinking about systems. I find it hard to fully trust an administrator who can't at least parse through other people's code.

Re:Very true, for many reasons.

[hairyfeet]

The problem is the way corps shit all over IT they'll just go "Hey, one more job we can dump on them without raising their pay!" and that will be that.

Lets face it folks, we are gonna end up with critical shortages of IT and infrastructure workers because between the offshoring, the H1-Bs, and the PHBs treating IT as this money pit that doesn't give them any profits? IT has been shat upon for the good part of the last decade.

I know myself and most of the old guard guys I knew ended up getting out of corporate IT for just this reason, piling more and more work upon us while expecting everything to be done with less help and a shrinking budget...now you want to add coding to the requirements? You gonna add a pay raise and pay for the classes? Yeah, thought not.

Re:Very true, for many reasons.

[fsck1nhippies]

2Cents, you are absolutely right. Even in windows systems, a basic understanding of what can be done with code can stop 5 people from running around to a couple hundred machines each.

Should the sysadmin be a programmer? Not in the conventional sense, but they should be able to programmatically attack the problems placed before them before they just brute force their way through them.

Re:Very true, for many reasons.

[fsck1nhippies]

I see a lot of admins in very large companies throw labor at a problem as their first course of action. It is typically a face palm moment for me as I often see the problems as fixable in minutes. I believe that all sysadmins should be able to program, but think that making a programmer a sysadmin is generally a bad idea.

Corollary: All IT People Should Have to Do It All

[Motard]

I've worked in companies ranging from 5 people to 40,000 (and plenty in between). In the smaller shops I've had to do administration, development, desktop, and customer support. In the larger 'enterprise' shops, I'm constantly amused by the myriad breakdowns in communications caused by folks being incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of their coworkers.

Being a developer made me a better system administrator. Being an admin made me a better developer. Same with operations, support, et. al.

Ah, age.

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point, we *had* to code. Tools didn't exist until we made them. Or at least tools that did what *we* wanted didn't exist until we made them.

I blame Windows weenies for the loss of this skill. They cannot function without pre-packaged clicky things. Nitwits.