Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience
This might be controversial, but I don&#x27;t think you get to be a half decent developer without being a reasonable sysadmin.<p>Maybe my experience is unusual, but I&#x27;ve never worked anywhere that the sysadmins knew more than the developers about how best to run their code in production. And when things go wrong with it how best to find the cause of the issue.<p>And I&#x27;ve never thrown code over a wall without having tested it in a representative environment.<p>The worst sysadmins get in the way of developers. Ones that scale down your CI server to the cheapest, throttled, one the hosting company has, leaving $800&#x2F;day contract developers waiting for builds that run in 20 seconds on their laptops take nearly an hour. And then try and argue the toss about whether the CI server is cost effective and every few months keep switching it down despite the CTO saying it needs to be left alone.<p>When a sysadmin sees an issue in &quot;their&quot; environment that they understand there&#x27;s a tendency for some of them to just see that issue as the only thing the developer has had to deal with that month. In all likelihood, in a productive company, it&#x27;s the most trivial issue the developer has had to resolve that day.<p>Often this stuff goes more smoothly where the developers (I mean, it&#x27;s not as though if you&#x27;re going to drop one of the two groups of people it&#x27;s going to be them going) manage production and there aren&#x27;t people with separate job titles and the resulting friction between them.<p>Sorry. There must be great sysadmins out there struggling with terrible developers, I&#x27;m sure of it. I just haven&#x27;t seen it.