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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> But it isn't all that hard to understand a clean Unix. I have never copied or typed a command that I don't understand.

Well, good for you. I can assure you that it's not the case for almost anyone who approached Linux after the likes of Mandrake were released and/or tried to make it work on anything different from a traditional server.

I'm all for trying to understand what one is doing (and I wholeheartedly agree with TFA's point), but the reality is that very few people in the world really understand all intricacies of one's operating system. This does not excuse poor security practices, but it explains their background.

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That's why you get someone who is capable of understanding it.

You wouldn't hire some high school kid who's just about taught themselves HTML by reading a book for a week, and get them to write your web application from ground up. You'd hire someone who knows what they're doing. Why is it seen as any different for Operations work? There is a reason systems administration is a skilled field, and a reason they're paid on a par with developers.

I think the reason this happens less and less is that sysadmins are cost centers, not revenue generators. When you have developers do that work (poorly or not), you don't have a group that's purely cost. Those costs get hidden in the development group.

Whoops replied to wrong comment!

However yes the issue of a team that "doesn't make money" is very real. Maybe you it should be "marketed" like legal or accounting: it doesn't make money, it saves money caused by SNAFUBAR situations.

Indeed, the costs merely get hidden and a lot of system decisions boil down to one of:

1. I saw it done that way in some blog.

2. We did it like that at my last job.

3. Seems like it works.

That high school kid needs to install a web server. Is he going to hire someone? No. He's going to copy a curl command.

I expect her to say "How do I install software on this platform?" "Oh! /(apt|yum|dnf)/!"

It's probably okay for him.

One of the problems (as I tried to argue) is that most Unices have become far more complex. The question is if the extra complexity is warranted on a server system, especially if bare Unix (OpenBSD serves as a good example here) was not that hard to understand.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should look back. Another possibility would be to deploy services as unikernels (see Mirage OS) that use a small, thin, well-understood library layer on top of e.g. Xen, so that there isn't really an exploitable operating system underneath.

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