How IT People See Each Other

Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 1022 points –

Not OC: Just found this on my old hard drive while grabbing some other stuff.

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The entire sys admin column is so on point!

As a sysadmin, I concur. Though the Neo panel in the bottom right should have also been another middle finger. If not that, then the Curb Your Enthusiasm meme where he's like "Fuck you, and I'll see you tomorrow" lol.

A fellow sysadmin, I thought we went extinct. I had to pivot to “infrastructure engineer” but it’s basically the same thing nowadays.

Job titles in IT don’t mean anything these days.

In particular, the term “engineer” has been butchered beyond recognition.

Wait so you’re telling me I’m NOT an engineer?

Agreed. I usually say developer because I view engineers as people who do actual engineering. I’m more of a plumber who fits pipes (pieces of software) together.

Digital archaelogist here.

Warm greetings to you from the Customer Success Evangelist.

That sounds like an actual job title, that works alongside a React Ninja. What do you do, exactly?

Oh, that isn't my actual title, I just wanted to mix together a pair of the more ridiculous trends.

My first job was as an “engineer”.

I spent most my time resetting passwords and setting up Outlook…

Wait so you’re telling me I’m NOT an engineer?

Are you licensed by the state? There's your answer!

These days it's more "do you have an engineering degree from an accredited University."

The vast majority of engineering diplomas are not in licensed areas.

Iirc it’s full blown illegal to call yourself an engineer in Canada unless you’re a licensed engineer. Meaning that if you marketed yourself as a software engineer without an engineering license, you could technically get in trouble. Not that I think they really enforce that for “Software Engineer”.

Not quite extinct, but endangered.

Thankfully there's been a recent trend of companies pulling back out of the cloud because reality set in and they're neither saving money nor getting a better experience than they had with their on-prem solutions.

So, if that trend holds, we'll hopefully go from endangered to merely threatened.

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I have two weeks left as a sysadmin and I'm transitioning to development. My experiences in sysadmin are a big reason I got in the door with little coding experience. A lot of devs don't have an in depth knowledge about computers outside of programming, and knowing that extra stuff can certainly raise the ceiling.

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Gosh the QA column is depressingly accurate for shitty game companies.

The best thing to take away from this meme isn't "lol QA dumb" or "lol Designers eat paint" it's "fuck, what kind of toxic asshole legitimately feels this way about their coworkers" and yea, they exist - I've met them. Don't be one of those assholes.

I feel like this one really deserves to be in there

this is how i see other sysadmins when they explain their 30yr old bash script that does everything.

Hey, that's completely unfair!

It's only 10 years old.

The one originally written in COBOL?

Nah, that dude died and left a logic bomb to delete all his scripts. All that's left is the weird imitation an intern cobbled together from observing the first dude.

Should have been rewritten in perl for maintainability tbqh!!

The lone wolf dev who hasnt been seen for 3 months explaining how the new microservices he created all integrate together

LOL. I'm assuming that would be how everyone but the project managers see project managers?

So I had finger dude twice when I made this, but I edited it in just for you

https://i.imgur.com/zQwuzXm.jpeg

You know, you can just google a term you don't know instead of acting confused. Just saying.

I don't know what people mean with

Just saying.

How do you define "Linux Stan"? I know the music video "Stan", by Enimem, but that's it.

That's where the term comes from originally. The song Stan. Then in the mid '00s and '10s the K-Pop fans got so aggressive they started referring to them as "armies" and "Stans."

A "Stan" is a super fan that is so obsessed that they'll do irrational things if they feel that they or their obsession is being threatened.

As a developer, I see sysadmins/devops as black magic masochists

As a DevOps guy, I can tell you we're black magic sadists. You should feel the pain. Not us.

I refer to our sysadmin as a BOFH and he doesn’t seem to mind. The younger devs don’t know the term without googling it.

The sysadmin column feels so right.

I refer to our sysadmin as a BOFH and he doesn’t seem to mind.

He's probably secretly delighted, although of course he'd never tell you that.

I sense a theme, when it comes to the sysadmins.

Having been a sysadmin you would be surprised at both the amount of times I had to explain why we couldn't just put an unprotected endpoint outside the firewall and also how much alcohol I drank to cope with the former.

It is like being builder to architects that think you can have a second story just floating in midair. I am baffled by how ignorant of the basics of infrastructure many developers are.

Obviously I don't expect a website dev to know the details of like iptables configs for load balancing with failover or whatever. Or even be terribly familiar with how to set up a production web server. I do expect people to know stuff like every computer on the internet is under constant attack from scripts. Or that taking advantage of peoples' trust and leaking their data is bad actually.

Daniel?

What are the odds of that working? You think I'd leave myself open to a simple brute force collision attack?

Also all sysadmins share a hive mind.

I guess the hive Mind saves on the booze. It's after 5 in some sysadmin's time zone

One might note they also have the highest average income

Fuck no we don't.

Averages are fun. It’s likely Opsy roles do have the highest average. But it’s also very true that devs have the highest ceilings. There’s just very few devs making 600+ and the majority at 120-150. Then there is an absolute shit load of opsys making 160-200. So in ops you hit the ceiling super fast while the occasional dev just keeps rocketing to bullshit pay but the averages are what they are

(Hiring manager for devops. I get the raw data through a corporate data broker)

Only people I ever have a problem with are Project Managers. I have had way more bad experiences with utterly psychotic PMs than PMs who are actually good at their job. Everybody else is super cool, but I swear all of you are alcoholics. At least Sales pays for the drinks?

A good PM is rare because as soon as you get one, they'll get poached within a few months.

Or burned out because they get pulled into every project that's gone off the rails.

Yup, before I went into tech I worked at an architecture firm and we had this one absolutely amazing PM from Australia who was smart, a clear communicator, and so much more on top of his shit then any other PM, and he burnt out and quit and moved back to Australia after like 2 years because they just kept throwing him into the absolute biggest messes since he was clearly the best at cleaning them up.

He's also the one who I got drunk at an airport bar with and just repeatedly urged me to leave the company and go somewhere well run ... there were pretty clear signs he wasn't enjoying his assignments.

Your failure to provide a reliable source for your claims is not my problem.

If you cannot provide a reliable source of your claims, your claim will be dismissed.

Ohhh that's me right now. I work in a consultancy and I only got assigned to projects that are on fire. It's almost 24 months without a gap between projects. Help me ಥ⁠_⁠ಥ

Put your foot down, establish boundaries, and take a well deserved vacation with 0 communication to work while on it. Otherwise, I would start looking somewhere else. Your health is more important.

Edit: Also, hit them a few times with your Wabbajack for me.

Help me ಥ⁠_⁠ಥ

"For those of us who are about to die, we salute you!"

I'm hoping you're not just an employee of that consultancy, but a contractor instead, and that you charge a good hourly rate, considering the situation you're in.

This tracks, my new boss used to be a PM, and she's God awful.

As someone who has been working in IT for 20+ years this is completely inaccurate except for the sys admin column.

Is "IT" a general term for tech workers in some places? I keep seeing people refer to it as such, but where I am, it is a term which primarily describes networking and infrastructure professionals.

IT stands for Information Technology. Relevant Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology

Yes, that is consistent with my understanding - networking and infrastructure. Engineering and management is generally not considered IT where I am unless they are directly supporting networking and infrastructure. But someone writing code for a game or app wouldn't be IT.

Software devs and designers usually fall under IT is my understanding but I can see why many people/places would make the distinction. Especially for companies that only write software, their IT would more be the infrastructure, but if they're only writing software for in house use that's more on the IT side. I could be completely wrong about this too, just how I saw them grouped.

The wiki link states software to be included in the definition. Management is not IT of course, but as there exists management in IT is used in the image I'd guess.

Right, there is definitely a software side of IT, but not all software is IT adjacent. IT software is really a very small field these days, compared to software in general.

Network engineering is kind of in the middle where you take the skill set of help desk and office management. This often leads to help desk and software development both falling under the organization in information technology. Application support also often falls under this category.

Someone should make a ven diagram.

The great promise of the cloud was to outsource sysadmins to be Microsoft and Amazon's problem.

At the cost of getting new sysadmins who are less numerous, but ask for more money, and best of all, you get to pay Microsoft and Amazon to train them!

Not only that, but it's no longer your problem when its in the cloud. You can blame the cloud for everything!

"Yeah we're familiar with this issue design, and have opened 17 support requests and upvoted 5 user voice posts to Microsoft about it. But hey we have this workaround that is not maintainable that you can use meanwhile"

That absolutely was a huge part of the marketing pitch, but as one who supports his company's cloud infrastructure...

Lol. Rofl. Lmao even.

Maybe that works for places that don't have heavy tech needs. Maybe.

It's almost like marketing makes it sound like it's a fully-managed, worry-free service where users can just call up Bill Gates himself instead of hundreds of management portals someone has to babysit.

They said that about computers going to make books disappear forty years ago… They never printed so many books that attempted to explain how those damn computers worked!

I feel like this is more "how we feel we get perceived by others" moreso.

I try and perceive all the members of my team as, well, my team. I heavily appreciate everyone busting their assess off and contributions.

However, there are folks on each layer that do actually treat others like this and I think we can all agree those people suuuuck.

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As a developer, the baby is how I see developers, too.

I kinda want an "End Users" one, too (already know what their "Sysadmins" would be).

Where's my network admins at?

Comprehended under sysadmin because the attitude is the same just the devices are a bit different.

I prefer that when done properly a network admin is simply forgotten about.

In 2024, I feel like we should have the power to create images that aren't fuzzy, overcompressed, and hard to see messes, yet here we are.

Read the post body.

Not OC: Just found this on my old hard drive while grabbing some other stuff.

But Admiral Patrick, how dare your ancient memes from times long forgotten not meet our modern expectations? Do you at least have a proper shitposting license?

I'll post mine as reference, may you gaze upon it and ponder the shortcomings of your horrible artifact-ridden memes!

An artifact ridden and overcompressed image of a man labelled "me" holding the mythical "Shitposting License", with the caption "What gives u the right to flood my newsfeed with ur crap memes?"

Funny thing is, I did upscale it a little bit. The original was worse xD

Lol, it is indeed one of the cleaner versions that I remember having seen, nice work! ^, ^

Image of a box labelled "Memories", with RAM memory sticks inside.

Yep this seems even more blurry and pixelated than the last 3 times I saw it haha

I imagine people resharing memes (long before OP here) take a photo of their monitor with a potato phone and then reupload that after resizing it with some shitty Motorola app or whatever first. Do that 3-4x and soon it's a mess.

I was in tier 1 support for a few years back in the day, so I'm trying to think of an appropriate image. Based on my experience... something disposable.

Helpdesk? You guys are like the people who have to go and fix a melting nuclear reactor. Necessary but only do it for like a year or two otherwise you get broken.

the illustration of the devs with 500 years of xp was missing hahaha

The designers as seen by designers is so right.

Nothing they come up with can be wrong, it's all innovative!!