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I’m both IT and development…and I’ve caught both sides being utterly wrong because they’re only familiar with one and not the other
I think it’s on a case by case basis but having help desk ppl help you out and opening powershell and noodling without any concept of problem solving made me make this face once.
It probably goes both ways, I’m a dev and I assembled computers at 12 yo so I believe I have a lot of experience and knowledge when it comes to hardware. I’ve also written code for embedded platforms.
IT people in my pov can really come across as enthusiast consumers when it comes to their hardware knowledge.
“did you guys hear Nvidia bas the new [marketing term] wow!” . Have you ever thought about what [marketing term] actually does past just reading the marketing announcement?
At the same time I swear to God devs who use macs have no idea how computers work at all and I mean EXCLUDING their skill as a dev. I’ve had them screen share to see what I imagine is a baby’s first day on a computer.
To close this rant: probably goes both ways
Agreed. I have colleagues that I write scripts for (I don’t do that any more, I stopped and shit stopped working, so they solve things manually now), they don’t know shit about scripting… and still don’t.
On the other hand, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a dev that was just this very positive, very friendly person and was also very knowledgeable when it came to hardware, so we were on the same page most of the time. He also accepted most of my code changes and the ones that he didn’t, gave him an idea of how to solve it more efficiently. We were a great team to be honest. We’re still friends. Don’t see him as frequently, but we keep in touch.
More like:
“IT people when software people talk about their requirements”No, we won’t whitelist your entire program folder in Endpoint Protection.
As a software person i have to protest at being called out like this. It’s the fucking weekend man…stop picking on me for just one damn day.
No, we can’t get gigabit fiber everywhere. No, I don’t care if your program needs it. Yes, the laws of physics are laws for a reason. Write more robust code.
Yep, unrealistic expectations.
Or “you need a 12th gen i7 to run this thing”… the thing is a glorified Avidemux.
Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…
Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.
In my experience it’s been IT people telling me you can’t use a certain tool or have more control over your computer cause of their rules.
The expression is appropriate but the meme assumes that im doubting the IT person’s expertise. I’m not, I’m just not liking the rules that get in the way of my work. Some rules do make sense though.
As an IT guy, I’d love to give software devs full admin rights to their computer to troubleshoot and install anything as they see fit, it would save me a lot of time out of my day. But I can’t trust everyone in the organization not to click suspicious links or open obvious phishing emails that invite ransomware into the organization that can sink a company overnight.
Fair points but as someone who works in cybersecurity. Phishing emails can happen without admin access. I haven’t heard of any randsomware that is triggered by just clicking on a link.
I think there should be some restrictions but highly technical people should slowly be given more and more control as they gain more trust/experience.
And the more corporate the organisation the more rules, at least the places I have worked trusts developers enough to give local admin, that takes the edge off many tasks.
“Their rules” are basic security precautions
I think you probably don’t realise you hate standards and certifications. No IT person wants yet another system generating more calls and complexity. but here is iso, or a cyber insurance policy, or NIST, or acsc asking minimums with checklists and a cyber review answering them with controls.
Crazy that there’s so little understanding about why it’s there, that you just think it’s the “IT guy” wanting those.
I thought my comment was pretty clear that some rules are justified and that the IT person can just be the bearer of bad news.
Maybe not, hopefully this comment clarifies.
So you don’t trust me, but you trust McAfee to give it full control over the system. Yet my software doesn’t work because something is blocked and nothing is showing up in the logs. But when we take off Mafee, it works. So clearly McAfee is not logging everything. And you trust Mcafee but not me? /s kinda.
No one on earth trusts McAfee, be it the abysmal man or abysmal AV suite.
If the EDR or AV software is causing issues with your code running, it’s possibly an issue with the suite, but it’s more likely an issue with your code not following common sense security requirements like code signing.
you don’t code sign during development…
I worked in software certification under Common Criteria, and while I do know that it creates a lot of work, there were cases where security has been improved measurably - in the hardware department, it even happened that a developer / manufacturer had a breach that affected almost the whole company really badly (design files etc stolen by a probably state sponsored attacker), but not the CC certified part because the attackers used a vector of attack that was caught there and rectified.
It seemingly was not fixed everywhere for whatever reason… but it’s not that CC certification is just some academic exercise that gives you nothing but a lot of work.
Is it the right approach for every product? Probably not because of the huge overhead power certified version. But for important pillars of a security model, it makes sense in my opinion.
Though it needs to be said that the scheme under which I certified is very thorough and strict, so YMMV.
I think the meme is more about perspectives and listening to the way someone thinks about operating IT is very different from the way someone things about architecting IT
“IT people” here, operations guy who keeps the lights on for that software.
It’s been my experience developers have no idea how the hardware works, but STRONGLY believe they know more then me.
Devops is also usually more dev than ops, and it shows in the availability numbers.
Absolutely agree, as a developer.
The devops team set up a pretty effective setup for our devops pipeline that allows us to scale infinity. Which would be great if we had infinite resources.
We’re hitting situations where the solution is to throw more hardware at it.
And IT cannot provision tech fast enough within budget for any of this. So devs are absolutely suffering right now.
I’ve always found this weird. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action. It certainly helps when you want to optimize memory access for speed etc.
I genuinely do know both sides of the coin. But I do know that the majority of my fellow developers at work most certainly have no clue about how computers work under the hood, or networking for example.
I find it weird because, to be good at software development (and I don’t mean, following what the computer science methodology tells you, I mean having an idea of the best way to translate an idea into a logical solution that can be applied in any programming language, and most importantly how to optimize your solution, for example in terms of memory access etc) requires an understanding of the underlying systems. That if you write software that is sending or receiving network packets it certainly helps to understand how that works, at least to consider the best protocols to use.
But, it is definitely true.
I think software was a lot easier to visualise in the past when we had fewer resources.
Stuff like memory becomes almost meaningless when you never really have to worry about it. 64,000 bytes was an amount that made sense to people. You could imagine chunks of it. 64 billion bytes is a nonsense number that people can’t even imagine.
. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action.
There’s so many layers of abstractions that it becomes impossible to know everything.
Years ago, I dedicated a lot of time understanding how bytes travel from a server into your router into your computer. Very low-level mastery.
That education is now trivia, because cloud servers, cloudflare, region points, edge-servers, company firewalls… All other barriers that add more and more layers of complexity that I don’t have direct access to but can affect the applications I build. And it continues to grow.
Add this to the pile of updates to computer languages, new design patterns to learn, operating system and environment updates…
This is why engineers live alone on a farm after they burn out.
It’s not feasible to understand everything under the hood anymore. What’s under the hood grows faster than you can pick it up.
yeah i wish it was a requirement that you’re nerdy enough to build your own computer or at least be able to install an OS before joining SWE industry. the non-nerds are too political and can’t figure out basic shit.
This is like saying before you can be a writer, you need to understand latin and the history of language.
You should if you want to be a science writer or academic, which lets be honest is a better comparison here. If your job involves latin for names and descriptions then you probably should take at least a year or two of latin if you don’t want to make mistakes here and there out of ignorance.
Before you can be a writer, you need to sharpen your own pencil.
Yup. Programmers who have only ever been programmers tend to act like god’s gift to this world.
20 year IT guy and I second this. Developers tend to be more troublesome than the manager wanting a shared folder for their team.
Rough and that sucks for your organization.
Our IT team would rather sit in a room with developers and solve those problems, than deal with hundreds of non-techs who struggle to add a chrome extension or make their printer icon show up.
I would love to work through issues but the stock of developers we currently have seem to either the rejects or have as someone else stated “a god complex”. They remind me of pilots in the military. All in all it is a loss for my organization.
As a developer I can freely admit that without the operations people the software I develop would not run anywhere but on my laptop.
I know as much about hardware as a cook knows about his stove and the plates the food is served on – more than the average person but waaaay less than the people producing and maintaining them.
As a devops manager that’s been both, it depends on the group. Ideally a devops group has a few former devs and a few former systems guys.
Honestly, the best devops teams have at least one guy that’s a liaison with IT who is primarily a systems guy but reports to both systems and devops. Why?
It gets you priority IT tickets and access while systems trusts him to do it right. He’s like the crux of every good devops team. He’s an IT hire paid for by the devops team budget as an offering in exchange for priority tickets.
But in general, you’re absolutely right.
Am I the only guy that likes doing devops thatbhas both dev and ops experience and insight? What’s with silosing oneself?
I’ve done both, it’s just a rarity to have someone experienced enough in both to be able to cross the lines.
Those are your gems and they’ll stick around as long as you pay them decently.
Hard to find.
Because the problem is that you need
- A developer
- A systems guy
- A social and great personality
The job is hard to hire for because those 3 in combo is rare. Many developers and systems guys have prickly personalities or specialise in their favourite part of it.
Devops spent have the option of prickly personalities because you have to deal with so many people outside your team that are prickly and that you have to sometimes give bad news to….
Eventually they’ll all be mad at you for SOMETHING…… and you have to let it slide. You have to take their anger and not take it personally…. That’s hard for most people, let alone tech workers that grew up idolising Linus torvalds, or Sheldon cooper and their “I’m so smart that I don’t need to be nice” attitudes.
It very much depends on how close to hardware they are.
If someone is working with C# or JavaScript, they are about as knowledgeable with hardware as someone working in Excel(I know this statement is tantamount to treason but as far as hardware is concerned it’s true
But if you are working with C or rust or god forbid drivers. You probably know more than the average IT professional you might even have helped correct hardware issues.
Long story short it depends.
I know this is not everyone and there’re some unicorns out there but after working with hiring managers for decades i can’t help but see cheap programmers when I see Devops. It’s ether Ops people that think they are programmers or programmers that are not good enough to get hired as Software Engineers outright at higher pay. It’s like when one person is both they can do both but not great at ether one. Devops works best when it’s a team of both dev and Ops working together. IMO
As a developer I like to mess with everything. Currently we are doing an infrastructure migration and I had to do a lot of non-development stuff to make it happen.
Honesly I find it really usefull (but not necessary) to have some understanding of the underying processes of the code I’m working with.
Could you give an example of something related to hardware that most developers don’t know about?
Simple example, our NASes are EMC2. The devs over at the company that does the software say they’re garbage, we should change them.
Mind you, these things have been running for 10 years straight 24/7, under load most of the time, and we’ve only swapped like 2 drives, total… but no, they’re garbage 🤦…
Accurate!
Developers are frequently excited by the next hot thing or how some billionaire tech companies operate.
I’m guilty of seeing something that was last updated in 2019 and having a look of disgust.
Well, at least you admit it, not everyone does.
I do agree that they’re out of date, but that wasn’t their point, their software somehow doesn’t like the NASes, so they had to look into where the problem was. But, their first thought was “let’s tell them they’re no good and tell them which ones to buy so we wouldn’t have to look at the code”.
I work on a team with mainly infrastructure and operations. As one of the only people writing code on the team. I have to appreciate what IT support does to keep everything moving. I don’t know why so many programmers have to get a chip on their shoulder.
In my experience a lot of IT people are unaware of anything outside of their bubble. It’s a big problem in a lot of technical industries with people who went to school to learn a trade.
That’s how I look at 90% of the shit “systems” I’m forced to interact with (xiaomi’s MIUI, banking apps, govt apps, apps that should’ve been fucking websites, websites that “gently nudge” you to use the app, electron apps that are windows only)
MiUI is not that bad IMO. The ad services and the integrated apps are horrible (even without the ads), but apart from that, the UI is fairly usable. They really haven’t changed that much from what Android comes with by default.
I don’t get it. And I’ve been both.
Is it about how some software shouldn’t need the resources that they demand for?
I took it as software engineers tend to build for scalability. And yep, IT often isn’t prepared for that or sees it as wasted resources.
Which isn’t a bad thing. IT isnt seeing the demands the manager/customer wants.
I’m glad you’ve done both because yeah, it’s a seesaw.
If IT provisions just enough hardware, we’ll hit bottlenecks and crashes when there’s a surprise influx of customers. If software teams don’t build for scale, same scenario, but worse.
From the engineer perspective, it’s always better to scale with physical hardware. Where IT is screaming, “We dont have the funds!”
Meh it’s usually for shitty companies that expect their devs to write real software, ssh into things, access databases, but put the same hurdles in front of them as joeblow from sales who can’t use an ipad to buy a sandwich without clicking a phishing link. So every new project is slowed down cause it takes weeks of emails and teams conversations to get a damn db sandbox and it’s annoying.
On the other hand IT doesn’t know you and has millions of issues to attend to
IT guy here. If we give one user special rights, that login will get passed around like a blunt at a festival to “save time”.
Users are dumb and lazy, and that includes devs.Users are dumb and lazy
Funny, that has actually been my entire experience with corporate IT. This field attracts the type of firemen that won’t climb down the pole because it’s a safety hazard. Y’all are… something special.
It’s not special rights, it’s project materials approved by leadership, and noted on a published and approved feature roadmap
Edit assuming requisitioning a scaled db replica is “special” is kinda aligned with the meme lol
I’d say… elitism
More likely tribalism.
Por que no los dos?
Because you can’t have elitism in the group that knows so little about fixing something that one of their actual plans of action is to reboot and pray
This is exactly my face when IT is telling me the rules for my passwords.
Sorry, those rules come from our cybersecurity insurance, or some compliance rules.
We hate them as much as you do.Then why are they different between systems? Do you have different insurers per application?
Those other applications come from an external vendor, we only provide the VM to run them.
We hate those even more than you do.You can’t
Every single issue that occurs with those applications gets thrown in our laps to fix.
This includes all of yours as well as all your colleagues.
See I think this is where in general people in it misunderstand the impact.
Like, if it’s -40 and your furnace breaks, who is having the worse day, you or the furnace repair man?
The repair man might be grumbling because they have to do their job, but you’re grumbling because you’re freezing. You both might be grumbling, but by way of impact there is a massive asymmetry in impact.
What applications do you have that IT controls the password requirements for?
IT controls your AD credential requirements in most cases and that’s pretty much it. It sounds like your employer needs to implement an SSO solution.
It is the AD credentials. It’s a fortune 500 company and it doesn’t even come close to NIST recommendations.
We have like 3 different ADs as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and the requirements are all different.
