What sort of skills does a sysadmin and DBA have that most engineers lack? Most engineers should know the basics of bash scripting, iptables, Unix logging, cron, systemd, etc. as well as SQL, debugging slow queries, optimizing them, backing up dbs, etc
_should_ know is different than _do_ know. Most engineers have little to no understanding of those systems topics and the only DB knowledge they've picked up is what leaks through their ORM
A person who competently knows all those topics _and_ how to write application code is worth their weight in gold
> A person who competently knows all those topics _and_ how to write application code is worth their weight in gold
IFF the company consistently values those skills. IME, they’ll say upon interviewing or hiring that those aren’t necessary for their workload, until they suddenly are, where you’re lauded as a hero. Predictably, the memory of hero status fades when promo season comes around, because those “aren’t core skillsets,” or something similar.
'fades when promo season comes around, because those “aren’t core skillsets,” or something similar.'
Exactly what I'm going through right now with a potential PIP. Last year I was told there was a solid basis for me being the getting the highest rating, but only if my core work was faster. Now they want to PIP me like nothing else I contribute to matters.
Yep. The speed issue they are pulling is an area that doesn't have any objective standards. So I ran a JIRA query to see how I stacked up against the other person who was my level on the team. We completed almost the same number of points over the course of this year...
Bash alone has a million footguns. If you know to use shellcheck you can probably survive those, and if you read the bash manual in its entirety you’ll almost certainly be well on your way to greatness, but getting devs to read docs – let alone boring, Web1.0 docs, is stretch.
> basics of SQL…
Have you seen the knobs Postgres and MySQL have to turn? Do you know what they all do, when you should turn them, and by how much?
The documentation for both of these is enormous and highly detailed, yet in no way covers everything that can and will go wrong. You only find those things out by using it day in and day out.
As to SQL itself, “I can do inner joins” is about as complex as I’ve seen most devs do. Hell, mention a semijoin and you’ll get blank stares.
I think in general, you’re grossly overestimating the average developer’s knowledge breadth and desire to learn these things. They simply do not matter for most, because tooling exists such that most of the time, they don’t need to know. I consider myself decent at Linux and RDBMS, but that’s mostly because I genuinely enjoy both, play with them in my off-time, and have been running Linux in some form or fashion for the last 20+ years. Also, of course, my work specializations (SRE —> DBRE) have helped.
