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System Admins Should Know How To Code

Posted by Unknown on from the helps-to-have-a-beard-too dept.

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.'"

9 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Very true, for many reasons. by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
    1. Re:Very true, for many reasons. by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:Very true, for many reasons. by fsck1nhippies · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Very true, for many reasons. by scubamage · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Exactly - it comes down to a matter of cost very often. If you can spend a half hour throwing together a script to make a configuration change across, say, 2000 devices (or in our case, several million), it is far cheaper than trying to find a vendor solution, or having folks go out and do the work themselves. The vendor will often have maintenance fees and high initial costs for a tool that "sort of" does what you want. You can have people go out and pound pavement, but if you have 2000 devices and send out 50 people, and it takes each person 20 minutes to do the work on the device plus 30 minutes trave time, times 17$ an hour... well, that adds up fast too. Not to mention the opportunity cost and backlog of tickets that that would generate.

    4. Re:Very true, for many reasons. by fsck1nhippies · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Very true, for many reasons. by hawguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      To be honest, most of my managers have been very nervous about my suggestions to even use tools which I'm knowledgable in because they don't understand the concepts. Ad the bigger the company the more likely they are to want a vendor solution rather than use internal resources.

      As a manager, sometimes I see the tool to automate and script changes to be a risk of taking down the network faster than anyone can do anything about it.

      Like the time a senior network admin accidentally took down our network by setting the IP address of all of our network switches to the same set of IP address. He tested the script and it worked perfectly on one network closet - then he proceeded to apply the remaining set of IP addresses the the remaining hundred network switches in our organization.

      He knew as soon as the first alarm went off what had happened, but by then it was too late to stop it. Fortunately, he had the good sense to not write the config to memory, so recovery just walking to each network closet to power cycle the switches -- much faster than if we had to walk around with a console cable to back out the changes on each switch

      That said, he still uses the same tool to push out changes, but he tests his scripts on 2 IDF's before pushing out changes and has the junior network admin double check his work.

      But I can see why a manager would be cautious about a new and untested automation tool.

  2. Not only admins by Mr2cents · · Score: 5, Informative

    In general, everybody dealing with computers can benefit from a bit of programming knowledge, not only admins. The rule of thumb is: if you're doing a repetitive, braindead job, you're doing it wrong. Computers are built to do exactly that. A small script can automate a lot of work for you, if you have that skill it can help you tremendously.

    --
    "It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
  3. Corollary: All IT People Should Have to Do It All by Motard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Ah, age. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.