&gt;The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence.<p>This is probably the most arrogant statement I&#x27;ve heard on Hacker News as somebody who has worn both the software engineer and sysadmin hat.<p>&quot;Obstructionism&quot; is what engineers, decoupled as they are from the realities of the hardware by their VMs and containers call &quot;due diligence&quot;.  As a sysadmin, I need to be assured and ensure what you want from the software ecosystem around the ball of lint you pushed onto me will not affect other line of business applications that make the company money.  That is what I am hired to do, along with fixing the whole mess when it breaks.  So a little due diligence and research is necessary to make sure that everything still runs.<p>The reason that many of the Perl scripts a sysadmin writes show &quot;complete lack of discipline&quot; is also a testament to the &quot;ooh, shiny!&quot; mentality of many engineers.  We already have a database system for reporting, so why are you scribbling out report files?  We have an automated system for dealing with system restarts and service restarts, so why are you doing it in the non-standard way?  Remember, by the time I see your code it&#x27;s too late - it&#x27;s already written and has been approved by management, and rewriting it or changing it is too expensive at this point so I have to work around your complete lack of regard for the standards that keep things running.<p>Just something to keep in mind next time you complain about &quot;obstruction&quot; and &quot;inconsistency&quot;.  I only put into place what you make, so perhaps you should spend some time looking in the mirror.