Hot new stuff is wish fulfillment by younger devs. They know it’ll take years to catch up with what the greybeards know about Linux or databases. If ever. If someone throws a curveball in then they reason everyone is on the same page. That nobody can be much more of an expert on 2 year old tech than they are.
What they don’t understand is that after 10 or 20 years of this drama you start to realize how much of this new shit is a repetition of the shit the “old shit” replaced, but with new jargon. Similar Shit, Different Day. Progress is not a ladder in IT, it’s a spiral. The scenery is never exactly the same but it swings through the old neighborhood all the fucking time.
At one point you need to admit Linux knowledge is unnecessary, beyond the basic cd/cp/chmox. Docker replaces it. Should I choose init.d or SystemD? None, just launch a new container.
I’ve spent too much time helping figure out why their container is broken to agree with this. It’s true that I use more general Unix knowledge than Linux knowledge, but that still counts for a lot.
I would only agree it can be a Bus Number skill rather than an everyone skill. My point is some day there will be a new OS the kids will embrace because everything is new to everyone and it’s their chance to shine.
When I worked at AWS as a support engineer I was unfortunately dumped into the containers team (EKS, ECS, Fargate, etc) despite being a "greybeard" in background.
A customer wrote in trying to figure out why his Fargate application kept crashing. The app would hit 100% CPU usage and then eventually start failing health checks before getting bounced (rebooted)
I relayed this back to the customer who insisted the app shouldn't be spiking in CPU usage and wanted to know why. Of course being a Fargate workload there's minimal ways to attach debugging to it. You can't just spawn htop on Fargate!
Doing due diligence I fired off an email to the team that managed the infrastructure. They curtly replied
"it failed healthchecks and got bounced"
"Okay but why"
"It hit 100% CPU"
"Okay but why?"
"It failed healthchecks and got bounced"
At no point were they either willing to interrogate or even consider the lower layers of the stack. The very existence of everything below the containerized app was seemingly irrelevant to them.
After going back and forth about this for nearly a month and a half with the customer I asked my boss to add me to the "Linux" support Slack channel. Reasoning that there's got to be other greybeards in there who (frankly) knew what they were doing better than these kids.
After writing a multi-paragraph explanation of all my findings along with the customer, moments before I hit SEND I got an email
The customers app was not releasing threads properly and causing the system to reach thread exhaustion and begin context switching, a CPU intensive process that eventually would take so long that the health check probes would breach timeout and say the app was down and restart it
Saying that "Linux knowledge is unnecessary" is to put it bluntly, ignorant to the point of clownishness. Having a holistic understanding of how a system operates is invaluable
> What they don’t understand is that after 10 or 20 years of this drama you start to realize how much of this new shit is a repetition of the shit the “old shit” replaced
That happens, sure, but all too often these same greybeards will fail to recognize when there is a truly novel thing. So do give new tech an honest chance before writing it off as reinventing the wheel.
Hyperscaler computer racks are reinvented supercomputers, and Cloud Software is quite frequently recreating features available on them in the 90's. Change My Mind.
What they don’t understand is that after 10 or 20 years of this drama you start to realize how much of this new shit is a repetition of the shit the “old shit” replaced, but with new jargon. Similar Shit, Different Day. Progress is not a ladder in IT, it’s a spiral. The scenery is never exactly the same but it swings through the old neighborhood all the fucking time.
Eat your vegetables kid.