Xenophobia and Elitism in the SysAdmin Community

http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2010/08/xenophobia-and-elitism-in-the-community/

by MPSimmons • 16 years ago

22 8 16 years ago

fgf• 16 years ago

The subject of the article was not what I expected.

Confusion3• 16 years ago

You should have looked in some more dictionaries. That definition is too strict.

Merrian-Webster:

  fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything
  that is strange or foreign

Dictionary.com:

  an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers
  or of that which is foreign or strange.

Yourdictionary.com:

  fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything
  foreign or strange

Cambridge Advanced Learners dictionary:

  extreme dislike or fear of foreigners, their customs,
  their religions, etc.

alnayyir• 16 years ago

No, it's just descriptivist trash and proper use of the language.

More like, should've looked it up in the dictionary and found neophobia.

Intellectual laziness is not just cause for using words improperly.

gaius• 16 years ago

You'll find that a professional sysadmin (or DBA, or network engineer) is technologically conservative for the simple reason that he or she is personally responsible for uptime, and gets paged at 3am when there's a problem, and more than likely uptime is a metric that feeds into their bonus calculation.

That's not fear of change. It's the experience to step beyond the technnology and see the bigger picture. The company's systems aren't a playground, they are the machinery of production. Proven technology, even if it's "obsolete" according to the blogosphere, rules in this world. Calling such people names just betrays inexperience.

Confusion3• 16 years ago

I don't understand why you think the article is against conservatism or even advocating using the latest fad. I read it as saying that Solaris sysadmins tend to disregard the tools and methods of Linux sysadmins (as a possible concrete example; I'm making it up on the spot, because the article doesn't give any concrete examples of the sort)

nailer• 16 years ago

Agreed. Additionally, most sysadmin work in first-world countries these days is infrastructure programming - first and second line support is inevitably handled offshore.

Writing a 20 line Perl script to do 'date -I' or not wishing to learn a new language to simplify sharing of code because it's been 15 years since you last learnt a new language isn't conservatism, it's fear of the unknown.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

I get these might lead to bad things, but it is also a very useful tool - you can discard a lot of ideas this way without having to examine them in detail (which takes far too much time) and you loose very little.

As for elitism, I never had much issue with that - who would you rather get advice from - Kissinger or Sara Palin?

Xenophobia and Elitism in the SysAdmin Community

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