Demand for programmers who know system admin stuff

[Michael Butash]

With the whole transition to libera.chat for irc and taking some time off
from work, I've taken to hanging out there a bit, and this is a common
thing I'm seeing in the #networking chat.  I'm seeing a lot of devs showing
up in #networking asking for hosting/sysadmin stuff lots, ala "how to make
apache do x", or "how do I automate my servers", which I find weird as
that's sysadmin stuff normally (to me).  Oddly enough it's a pretty diverse
crowd of folks that are kinda hybrids, done networking, done sysadmin, some
are php/web devs, etc, but lots of system-centric stuff so it tends to work
out for info seekers.  I suspect if I went into #sysadmin or like, they'd
know nothing of networking, but #networking tends to come from diverse
enough roots they do this stuff too, or did at one point at least.

Moral is, there's a lot of crossover these days, and folks need to know
some dev, some sysadmin, and some networking.  The line blurs, but people
can't just be like "well, I only do mssql or active directory" anymore,
they're replaceable with shell scripts.  I've done unix/linux, some dev,
some dba, some windoze, everything between along with a strong focus and
experience in networking, and it's paid dividends as I figure out what
others don't as a result.

Comparing to the OSI model of networking, I work mostly layer 1-7 up, but
most dev/app/sysadmins work layer 7 down, and really have no idea below
around layer 5 or so, much to their detriment.  Best these days to be well
versed across the board to some extent.  Take a ccna class online, even if
you don't get the cert, you'll probably understand things a lot more to
make your life easier.

-mb


On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 5:11 PM Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

>
>
> Hi,
>
> I've watched more than a few of NetworkChuck's videos.  Here he is on a
> programmer's channel talking about programmers learning networking.
> I've always thought all web programmers have some Linux skills, and
> maybe that is not what he is talking about.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlN-vMF13QY&t=0s
>
> How does this work for hosting admin?  Is there the same demand in the
> hosting admin niche?  If so what exactly should one know and what types
> of jobs can they get?
>
> He mentions Python - is that the programming language to know for server
> automation?  He also mentioned Perl.  I thought Perl was/is dead?
>
> I'm a PHP developer and find a lot of hosting tools such as Plesk and
> ISPConfig are written in PHP and use MySQL.
>
> Your Thoughts?
>
> Thanks!!
>
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