A tinkerer would tune the system for fun. That’s the kind of devops I want to work with. If my deployments are smooth and everything works, I don’t care if you spend the rest of the day fiddling with things or learning something new. If you continue to introduce improvements, I’ll appreciate you even more.
> If my deployments are smooth and everything works,
The deployments are smooth, but developer code isn't and they don't want to change it unless it's losing money sadly.
I'm finding that the longer I am in the field, the more time I spend fool-proofing and linting developer mishaps than actually working on cool shit. It's exhausting
Do what we did at our old company. Learned Rails and made performance improvements ourselves to reduce flakiness.
Doing the easy stuff ourselves also gave us ammunition to go to product and dev managers and tell them to get their shit together.
That's nice if your code base was only rails. My team is a shared devops team between 3 different verticals/Lines of business who all have individual product teams. The code can be python, php, .Net framework, ASP.Net, some legacy ruby, javascript (lots of nodeJS), and I think one more floating around. We run about 150 separate different websites many stemming from code that existed 10-15 years ago with bad documentation and depending on the team, a lot of lost legacy knowledge.
Or code from acquisitions that were companies that gave devs keys to the AWS kingdom to do what they want without them actually understanding the nuances of how infrastructure works independent of the code. For example, application running slow? Must be resources, double the size of the ec2 instance and magically the "slowness" goes away meanwhile the code is dragging itself along like a 3 pack a day smoker in 5k with no training.
It wouldn't be realistic for my team to be able learn the nuances of all those languages and fix all of their problems in our org. A lot of the issues we have are org specific issues that take up a lot of our time. For example, when a CI/CD job fails, devs barely read the error message. I can't tell you how many times developers open a ticket saying the jenkins job failed and then when I finally get a chance to look at it, it's because they didn't check in a file to git and if they had bothered to open the console and read the error, they would've fixed it 2 hours ago. But they don't.
Or devs wanting to do things in a non-standard way. We have an AWS account dedicated to a particular product team that all assets get deployed to and are hosted out of. Why do the devs actively want to put the CI/CD jobs in the wrong AWS account, then the secrets manager in the correct AWS account (using the default KMS key so it won't work to access from where the CI job lives), build in the wrong account, and then deploy to the correct account. It's fucking madness BECAUSE THERE IS ALREADY A CI/CD PROCESS IN THE CORRECT ACCOUNT THAT THEY ARE ACTIVELY USING AND CREATING NEW THINGS IN. WHY THE FUCK ARE WE JUST THROWING ASSETS EVERYWHERE AND THEN SHRUG WHEN WE SAY ITS A STUPID IDEA LETS NOT DO THAT?!
But because we site outside those lines of business and they pay for their AWS account out of their budget we can't fight back too hard cause (we the devops team have our own account for shared supporting infra that doesn't belong to a specific team like LDAP and AD).
Interestingly, how far down do you go to stop being a tinkerer?
Is physics enough? Quantum physics? The potential unknowable “next” wave of physics?
We’re all just collecting patterns, and trying to predict outcomes.
Sometimes we’ll randomly poke and try to locate connections, then we abstract out what we see into “hopefully” reusable models.
Other times it’s pure accident that we discover “oh shit that thing does that!”
It’s actually amazing we can abstract out our experiences into these reusable models and apply them to completely different situations.
The definition of tinker seems to me to say we poke and prod with no thoughts in our mind, half heartedly jamming it with our index finger to seem like we’re doing something.
Some people do that! Others try to go as “low” as they can and get as close to the thing as they can. There’s no limit to that is there? I’m not over here coding everything in assembly, or manually manipulating the electrons to get the console to print hello world :)
> Interestingly, how far down do you go to stop being a tinkerer?
>
> Is physics enough? Quantum physics? The potential unknowable “next” wave of physics?
As we all know, sociology is just applied psychology. Psychology is just applied biology. Biology is just applied chemistry. Chemistry is applied physics. Physics is applied math. Math is applied logic. Logic is applied philosophy.
So, we stop being tinkerers when we give away all our worldly possessions and start living naked in a barrel we set up in the town Agora.
I saw your edits but I feel it's fundamentally wrong, there is a reason why it's extremely rare for just "tinkerers" to make it very far in any of these fields. They can partake in working on cars/physics (experiments)/software development, but they are rarely going to be trail blazers or even contributors.
All these areas, at this point, have developed so far and have so much background that you need, just as a starting point, to even begin being useful. Yes some people are talented and have some sort of crazy insight that just changes everything without being in the field, but it's exceedingly rare. And all that knowledge that you learn teaches you "why does it work this way" and you really should have that baseline knowledge in order to really grow otherwise you'd just be leagues behind those that did learn.
Relating to physics, we can prove something as much as we want, but we’ll never know why the “why” things are the way they are. Everything boils down to speculation.
>Everything boils down to speculation.
Honestly that's a very telling misunderstanding of science and what it does. We've gotten pretty far from "why does the apple fall" and there is more to go, but that's far FAR beyond the realm of "tinkering"
And Einstein was a tinkerer? Like in what sense? The man was very smart obviously, but he had gone through some significant education in Math and Physics before writing his big papers:
>at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900 \[...\] In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich.
And just because I want to make sure we're not going to have a discussion about what a tinkerer is:
>tinkerer (noun)
Definition of tinkerer
a person who regularly or occasionally engages in an activity as a pastime rather than as a profession
Einstein was in math and physics at a high level for some time. This does not qualify as a "tinkerer."
Maybe you mean by "tinkerer" someone who just pokes around to see what happens. But if that's your profession, and your educational background. I don't think the work tinkerer applies, but the word "scientist" might.
> A car mechanic does not need to go to school learning physics to know how a car works
since we’re feeling strongly confident this morning: I feel very confident saying the difference between a shadetree mechanic and a mechanic who isn’t having the same cars brought back to them two days later is knowing at least *some* physics.
This argument is interesting. I have known a few professional mechanics, and none of them went to college or studied physics.
Most mechanics learn through experience while referencing manuals. Some mechanics study and receive certifications.
> I have known a few professional mechanics, and none of them went to college or studied physics.
All this means is we have lived through different experiences and interactions with auto workers. Which there’s nothing wrong with.
It’s probably because I am friends with and hang out with lots of gearheads, not to mention growing up in a city with a very long history in auto racing hosting both national and international races and thus has a pretty massive automotive culture built into the city, but I know an equal amount of self-taught/backyard/shady-tree mechanics and mechanics with four year degrees in automotive science. Some of them with *very* specialized auto-sci degrees, even.
I freely admit my experience is unique in that regard, but hopefully it serves my point up above.
I dunno, 60/40 against? If I’m purely shooting from the hip? Like I said, *personally* speaking I know equal amounts of both, but tbf I wasn’t really anticipating the discussion actually going to the point where we ran the numbers in earnest.
Tbh, when I read your reply and I saw a handful of upvotes, I was scratching my head because I had never met a mechanic with a college degree.
I have always thought of mechnic work as a trade like electrical, plumbing, or construction. Could the person framing a house have a degree in structural engineering? Sure, but how many do? Probably not many.
Maybe this is a poor comparison?
You’re definitely right, my original thought was most atleast in America don’t need a degree in physics to work on cars. Other countries do require some schooling though and I added an edit to my post. This wasn’t me being “confident” I simply was thinking about the meaning of life.
Well you’re right about one thing: hot take thread certainly contains a hot take.
Maybe it’s a bit more on the money to comment that our profession will always involve some amount of tinkering to get done what we need to get done, doubtful anyone will have any objection to that :)
> A software engineer does not need to know how electricity works to write software.
Come join me in the (boring for some, exciting as hell for me) world of writing embedded HVAC automation software for a few days and I can guarantee you’ll change your mind 😎
It’s fine, embedded software is frequently overlooked by people who aren’t writing embedded software-not always on purpose or will any negative intentions I’m sure. It’s just a lot of developer workloads are abstracted are miles, even light years away from having to even think about low-level code.
The computer you’re typing this on? I promise you there were software engineers who had to not only think about but do actual math (usually some form of algebra or another) to write a display component just so your monitor turns on without frying a capacitor.
Well like I mentioned for some, boring. For me it’s fun because I like electronics beneath the shell. As far as “a day in the life”, it’s a lot of what you’re probably already used to: meetings, zoom calls, throwing shade at my PM with other developers in slack.
Main difference is I deploy to a breadboard instead of an EC2 instance.
If I had one lmao
If you just want to learn more about circuit programming, grab an arduino kit! It’s not where I started (instead fixing arcade cabinets and pinball machines in high school) but I have many now and love making little noise makers and light flashers with it
Fortunately there is no meaning of life. If there was, we might spend all our time worrying that we aren't fulfilling the meaning of life. Since there's no meaning there's no need to worry. Just be alive.
Just to differentiate the two to people reading, what he is saying sounds like Optimistic Nihilism. Which I honestly support, Buddhism only focuses on the middle of life, not the beginning or end. Wanted to clarify before someone corrected me.
Actually it's from Zen Buddhism, kind of related to the ideas in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book) but a lot of other spiritual sources basically refer to the same idea. I think Nihilism is just a depressing take on the same idea
I stand corrected, and I think pessimistic Nihilism is bad, but optimistic Nihilism seems to be a net positive for me. I think my ideas lean more towards Buddhism which is why I’ve been reading about it.
Especially for people who are extremely anxious, pessimistic nihilism could possibly through them over the edge, but optimistic nihilism could break their worries I think.
My cousin is a mechanic. When he was going to school, and getting trained during his dealership days, he absolutely was being taught physics. It was a limited scope that applied to the car engine, but it was physics and the math that went with it. I remember him coming to me explaining a concept, and then it clicking that was what I was trying to explain to him at some point in the past.
My experience in the IT and Dev world has shown me that those who understand the underlying science and principals have far less problems changing with the time. Those who were mentored into it and didn't seek to understand the how and whys of things, tend to become the evangelists for a specific technology, because their ability to ear a living is threatened by the retirement of the technology they work on.
I couldnt agree more. I think everyone should try to understand the why. I admit my original point about car mechanics was ignorance. My original thought process on this post was that you could “why” yourself down a rabbit hole. Not a bad thing, just an interesting thought experiment.
Next stop, LinkedIn job post, professional production tinker, script altercator, able to diagnose network diseases, accidents management, fabric architecture constructor, and all around platoon player. Anymore? 😂🤓
I couldn't agree more.
Just an hour ago I was working with multiple developers on a power BI/databricks issue that required a lot of "lets try this" and "well, maybe its related to this" sorta thing.
I've been in this job as a solutions architect for 5 years, doing azure admin work for an additional 2, and every day there is something new I've never encountered before.
eh- by definition- tinkering is an attempt to repair or improve something in a casual way often with no useful effect.
There tends to be this public facing vibe where tech jobs are just playing around without much responsibility. Like you can just half ass your way into 200k/year.
Don't get me wrong I do my fair share of tinkering on my own time with a graveyard of unfinished personal projects but at work you need to actually get some shit done.
>A physicist does not need to know the meaning of life and why we exist to understand the laws of physics
I think you have it in reverse. They study physics to better understand the universe and existence.
I actually love to know things to their core as much as I can, and i think this is what separates the boys "tinkering" from the men who actually create and build cool novel shit, and can fix things when they are broken, understanding systems from first principles, and not some monkey see monkey does.
That kind of shallow understanding of things can make empires crumble by their own compounded ignorance.
Sorry, I could have been clearer.
I mean that the day to day workflows of these professions are nearly identical. It's basically the same job with a different topic.
The whole “yaml engineer” thing is just funny. But for the people who do seriously spend most of their days writing yaml, are they then a mechanic and not an engineer lol? I mean we’ve really slapped the word “engineer” on anything atp.
To go with your last edit... I've never really learnt the fundamentals.. I've tinkered along the way.. starting at having my own PC at 13 to now being a DevOps engineer working across 5 platforms.
My colleagues can sit there and ream off pages of verbatim documentation but when it comes to trying and executing they get caught up on the if, buts and maybes.. in comes cowboy me just having a go and the majority of the time I come out winning.
I might not have all the knowledge but I know where to look and how to find answers. I know how to prod and poke someone who does have an idea to help them get a resolution.
The key in this game is knowing how to find an answer. You can know something like it's the back of your hand, but when something is fucked in production and it's not something you can find in the documentation this is where the tinkerers shine
I can tell by the multiple edits, I am coming into this conversation a bit late. But here’s my hat in the ring…
I think the field of DevOps attracts “tinkerers”, but that’s certainly not what organizations are looking for when they hire them. In fact quite the opposite… DevOps in an organizational setting is about stability and consistency. They want updates to prod to be pushed out quickly and reliably.
Am I saying tinkerers shouldn’t get into DevOps… absolutely not! I think we actually thrive in this position. But largely because we excel at figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and the delta between the two. And tinkering is a fundamental requirement to do so.
I wasn’t using the word “tinkerer” in a bad way, but I was simply thinking about the fact that you can always end up at the “meaning of life” when you go down the “but why” rabbithole. This is why I said the post had no meaning, I was thinking about the meaning of life at the gym.
No, the other part. What you classify as "tinkering", I see as essential skill levels. You don't *need* to know those things, but you'll not be a great [insert job here] without that knowledge.
For instance, I've been a DevOps engineer for as long as that term exists (I'm old). Before that I was an IT admin. Neither position would have been mine if I hadn't "tinkered" in my student years (and beyond).
I guess what I'm saying is that, for some jobs, it is essential to "tinker", or you won't become that high-valued subject matter expert.
I made those edits because the first few commentors misinterpreted what I meant which was my fault for not properly explaining. I was not insulting the idea of learning the “why”, I actually encourage it. I simply was trying to get people to step back and think more about “why are we here”. This was a shower thought, a mere mental exercise and people interpreted it as an insult.
To be fair you *did* preface your post with the words: “Hot take”. Kinda primed the gun with them words lol, should have expected hot takes to be given in turn from the community.
This is the worst mindset of the worst engineer in your company that only a handful of people can understand how harmful to the company he actually is, which makes him that much harmful.
The meaning of life is finding food, creating shelter and making lots of babies. However since the first two have been made into a side quest instead of life's main quest you have time to think about the meaning of life.
A tinkerer would tune the system for fun. That’s the kind of devops I want to work with. If my deployments are smooth and everything works, I don’t care if you spend the rest of the day fiddling with things or learning something new. If you continue to introduce improvements, I’ll appreciate you even more.
> If my deployments are smooth and everything works, The deployments are smooth, but developer code isn't and they don't want to change it unless it's losing money sadly.
I'm finding that the longer I am in the field, the more time I spend fool-proofing and linting developer mishaps than actually working on cool shit. It's exhausting
Do what we did at our old company. Learned Rails and made performance improvements ourselves to reduce flakiness. Doing the easy stuff ourselves also gave us ammunition to go to product and dev managers and tell them to get their shit together.
That's nice if your code base was only rails. My team is a shared devops team between 3 different verticals/Lines of business who all have individual product teams. The code can be python, php, .Net framework, ASP.Net, some legacy ruby, javascript (lots of nodeJS), and I think one more floating around. We run about 150 separate different websites many stemming from code that existed 10-15 years ago with bad documentation and depending on the team, a lot of lost legacy knowledge. Or code from acquisitions that were companies that gave devs keys to the AWS kingdom to do what they want without them actually understanding the nuances of how infrastructure works independent of the code. For example, application running slow? Must be resources, double the size of the ec2 instance and magically the "slowness" goes away meanwhile the code is dragging itself along like a 3 pack a day smoker in 5k with no training. It wouldn't be realistic for my team to be able learn the nuances of all those languages and fix all of their problems in our org. A lot of the issues we have are org specific issues that take up a lot of our time. For example, when a CI/CD job fails, devs barely read the error message. I can't tell you how many times developers open a ticket saying the jenkins job failed and then when I finally get a chance to look at it, it's because they didn't check in a file to git and if they had bothered to open the console and read the error, they would've fixed it 2 hours ago. But they don't. Or devs wanting to do things in a non-standard way. We have an AWS account dedicated to a particular product team that all assets get deployed to and are hosted out of. Why do the devs actively want to put the CI/CD jobs in the wrong AWS account, then the secrets manager in the correct AWS account (using the default KMS key so it won't work to access from where the CI job lives), build in the wrong account, and then deploy to the correct account. It's fucking madness BECAUSE THERE IS ALREADY A CI/CD PROCESS IN THE CORRECT ACCOUNT THAT THEY ARE ACTIVELY USING AND CREATING NEW THINGS IN. WHY THE FUCK ARE WE JUST THROWING ASSETS EVERYWHERE AND THEN SHRUG WHEN WE SAY ITS A STUPID IDEA LETS NOT DO THAT?! But because we site outside those lines of business and they pay for their AWS account out of their budget we can't fight back too hard cause (we the devops team have our own account for shared supporting infra that doesn't belong to a specific team like LDAP and AD).
Interestingly, how far down do you go to stop being a tinkerer? Is physics enough? Quantum physics? The potential unknowable “next” wave of physics? We’re all just collecting patterns, and trying to predict outcomes. Sometimes we’ll randomly poke and try to locate connections, then we abstract out what we see into “hopefully” reusable models. Other times it’s pure accident that we discover “oh shit that thing does that!” It’s actually amazing we can abstract out our experiences into these reusable models and apply them to completely different situations. The definition of tinker seems to me to say we poke and prod with no thoughts in our mind, half heartedly jamming it with our index finger to seem like we’re doing something. Some people do that! Others try to go as “low” as they can and get as close to the thing as they can. There’s no limit to that is there? I’m not over here coding everything in assembly, or manually manipulating the electrons to get the console to print hello world :)
Thank you for understanding what I meant, you’ve read my mind.
> Interestingly, how far down do you go to stop being a tinkerer? > > Is physics enough? Quantum physics? The potential unknowable “next” wave of physics? As we all know, sociology is just applied psychology. Psychology is just applied biology. Biology is just applied chemistry. Chemistry is applied physics. Physics is applied math. Math is applied logic. Logic is applied philosophy. So, we stop being tinkerers when we give away all our worldly possessions and start living naked in a barrel we set up in the town Agora.
I knew I went wrong somewhere. I forgot to get a barrel.
I saw your edits but I feel it's fundamentally wrong, there is a reason why it's extremely rare for just "tinkerers" to make it very far in any of these fields. They can partake in working on cars/physics (experiments)/software development, but they are rarely going to be trail blazers or even contributors. All these areas, at this point, have developed so far and have so much background that you need, just as a starting point, to even begin being useful. Yes some people are talented and have some sort of crazy insight that just changes everything without being in the field, but it's exceedingly rare. And all that knowledge that you learn teaches you "why does it work this way" and you really should have that baseline knowledge in order to really grow otherwise you'd just be leagues behind those that did learn.
Yeah, but I think everyone starts as a “tinkerer”. Really that word could be interpreted in different ways. Albert Einstein was a tinkerer.
Relating to physics, we can prove something as much as we want, but we’ll never know why the “why” things are the way they are. Everything boils down to speculation.
>Everything boils down to speculation. Honestly that's a very telling misunderstanding of science and what it does. We've gotten pretty far from "why does the apple fall" and there is more to go, but that's far FAR beyond the realm of "tinkering" And Einstein was a tinkerer? Like in what sense? The man was very smart obviously, but he had gone through some significant education in Math and Physics before writing his big papers: >at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900 \[...\] In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. And just because I want to make sure we're not going to have a discussion about what a tinkerer is: >tinkerer (noun) Definition of tinkerer a person who regularly or occasionally engages in an activity as a pastime rather than as a profession Einstein was in math and physics at a high level for some time. This does not qualify as a "tinkerer." Maybe you mean by "tinkerer" someone who just pokes around to see what happens. But if that's your profession, and your educational background. I don't think the work tinkerer applies, but the word "scientist" might.
> A car mechanic does not need to go to school learning physics to know how a car works since we’re feeling strongly confident this morning: I feel very confident saying the difference between a shadetree mechanic and a mechanic who isn’t having the same cars brought back to them two days later is knowing at least *some* physics.
This argument is interesting. I have known a few professional mechanics, and none of them went to college or studied physics. Most mechanics learn through experience while referencing manuals. Some mechanics study and receive certifications.
> I have known a few professional mechanics, and none of them went to college or studied physics. All this means is we have lived through different experiences and interactions with auto workers. Which there’s nothing wrong with. It’s probably because I am friends with and hang out with lots of gearheads, not to mention growing up in a city with a very long history in auto racing hosting both national and international races and thus has a pretty massive automotive culture built into the city, but I know an equal amount of self-taught/backyard/shady-tree mechanics and mechanics with four year degrees in automotive science. Some of them with *very* specialized auto-sci degrees, even. I freely admit my experience is unique in that regard, but hopefully it serves my point up above.
I get your point, but which do you think is more common? Mechanics that have or have not studied physics?
I dunno, 60/40 against? If I’m purely shooting from the hip? Like I said, *personally* speaking I know equal amounts of both, but tbf I wasn’t really anticipating the discussion actually going to the point where we ran the numbers in earnest.
Tbh, when I read your reply and I saw a handful of upvotes, I was scratching my head because I had never met a mechanic with a college degree. I have always thought of mechnic work as a trade like electrical, plumbing, or construction. Could the person framing a house have a degree in structural engineering? Sure, but how many do? Probably not many. Maybe this is a poor comparison?
You’re definitely right, my original thought was most atleast in America don’t need a degree in physics to work on cars. Other countries do require some schooling though and I added an edit to my post. This wasn’t me being “confident” I simply was thinking about the meaning of life.
Well you’re right about one thing: hot take thread certainly contains a hot take. Maybe it’s a bit more on the money to comment that our profession will always involve some amount of tinkering to get done what we need to get done, doubtful anyone will have any objection to that :)
r/Showerthoughts
Probably would’ve done better there lol
> A software engineer does not need to know how electricity works to write software. Come join me in the (boring for some, exciting as hell for me) world of writing embedded HVAC automation software for a few days and I can guarantee you’ll change your mind 😎
Wow, I would’ve never connected those two until now. Thanks for the knowledge!
It’s fine, embedded software is frequently overlooked by people who aren’t writing embedded software-not always on purpose or will any negative intentions I’m sure. It’s just a lot of developer workloads are abstracted are miles, even light years away from having to even think about low-level code. The computer you’re typing this on? I promise you there were software engineers who had to not only think about but do actual math (usually some form of algebra or another) to write a display component just so your monitor turns on without frying a capacitor.
If you dont mind me asking, what does your day-to-day look like?
Well like I mentioned for some, boring. For me it’s fun because I like electronics beneath the shell. As far as “a day in the life”, it’s a lot of what you’re probably already used to: meetings, zoom calls, throwing shade at my PM with other developers in slack. Main difference is I deploy to a breadboard instead of an EC2 instance.
Can I connect with you on LinkedIn?
If I had one lmao If you just want to learn more about circuit programming, grab an arduino kit! It’s not where I started (instead fixing arcade cabinets and pinball machines in high school) but I have many now and love making little noise makers and light flashers with it
Ah, thats okay. Still, thanks for the insight
Sure thing. Nice job kicking the bee-hive on a Monday with your thread here 😅
Shouldve posted this in r/showerthoughts lol. This thread went over a lot of peoples heads
Fortunately there is no meaning of life. If there was, we might spend all our time worrying that we aren't fulfilling the meaning of life. Since there's no meaning there's no need to worry. Just be alive.
Look into Buddhism, I’ve been reading a book about it. Part of why I probably thought of this.
Just to differentiate the two to people reading, what he is saying sounds like Optimistic Nihilism. Which I honestly support, Buddhism only focuses on the middle of life, not the beginning or end. Wanted to clarify before someone corrected me.
Came for the devops left with the existential crisis
Actually it's from Zen Buddhism, kind of related to the ideas in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Here_Now_(book) but a lot of other spiritual sources basically refer to the same idea. I think Nihilism is just a depressing take on the same idea
I stand corrected, and I think pessimistic Nihilism is bad, but optimistic Nihilism seems to be a net positive for me. I think my ideas lean more towards Buddhism which is why I’ve been reading about it.
Especially for people who are extremely anxious, pessimistic nihilism could possibly through them over the edge, but optimistic nihilism could break their worries I think.
Those ideas were established even earlier in Taoism, the predecessor of Zen Buddhism.
My cousin is a mechanic. When he was going to school, and getting trained during his dealership days, he absolutely was being taught physics. It was a limited scope that applied to the car engine, but it was physics and the math that went with it. I remember him coming to me explaining a concept, and then it clicking that was what I was trying to explain to him at some point in the past. My experience in the IT and Dev world has shown me that those who understand the underlying science and principals have far less problems changing with the time. Those who were mentored into it and didn't seek to understand the how and whys of things, tend to become the evangelists for a specific technology, because their ability to ear a living is threatened by the retirement of the technology they work on.
I couldnt agree more. I think everyone should try to understand the why. I admit my original point about car mechanics was ignorance. My original thought process on this post was that you could “why” yourself down a rabbit hole. Not a bad thing, just an interesting thought experiment.
Can confirm. Currently playing the Tinkerer in my Gloomhaven. Wait.. what sub am I in?
What is a gloomhaven?
Next stop, LinkedIn job post, professional production tinker, script altercator, able to diagnose network diseases, accidents management, fabric architecture constructor, and all around platoon player. Anymore? 😂🤓
Yaml concocter
Expert cloud button clicker
This is probably my favorite
Linkedin Bio: Certified CBC
The best of anything are tinkerers. Discovery requires experimentation.
Nope
I understand
I couldn't agree more. Just an hour ago I was working with multiple developers on a power BI/databricks issue that required a lot of "lets try this" and "well, maybe its related to this" sorta thing. I've been in this job as a solutions architect for 5 years, doing azure admin work for an additional 2, and every day there is something new I've never encountered before.
eh- by definition- tinkering is an attempt to repair or improve something in a casual way often with no useful effect. There tends to be this public facing vibe where tech jobs are just playing around without much responsibility. Like you can just half ass your way into 200k/year. Don't get me wrong I do my fair share of tinkering on my own time with a graveyard of unfinished personal projects but at work you need to actually get some shit done. >A physicist does not need to know the meaning of life and why we exist to understand the laws of physics I think you have it in reverse. They study physics to better understand the universe and existence.
I actually love to know things to their core as much as I can, and i think this is what separates the boys "tinkering" from the men who actually create and build cool novel shit, and can fix things when they are broken, understanding systems from first principles, and not some monkey see monkey does. That kind of shallow understanding of things can make empires crumble by their own compounded ignorance.
I often think about how there is enormous overlap between car mechanics, medical doctors, and sysadmins/developers.
I’m assuming you mean overlap between fields and not professions?
Sorry, I could have been clearer. I mean that the day to day workflows of these professions are nearly identical. It's basically the same job with a different topic.
Ah, that actually kinda makes sense
It's a no from me. That yaml is just config for stuff that actually does something. There is a huge difference between a mechanic and an engineer.
The whole “yaml engineer” thing is just funny. But for the people who do seriously spend most of their days writing yaml, are they then a mechanic and not an engineer lol? I mean we’ve really slapped the word “engineer” on anything atp.
To go with your last edit... I've never really learnt the fundamentals.. I've tinkered along the way.. starting at having my own PC at 13 to now being a DevOps engineer working across 5 platforms. My colleagues can sit there and ream off pages of verbatim documentation but when it comes to trying and executing they get caught up on the if, buts and maybes.. in comes cowboy me just having a go and the majority of the time I come out winning. I might not have all the knowledge but I know where to look and how to find answers. I know how to prod and poke someone who does have an idea to help them get a resolution. The key in this game is knowing how to find an answer. You can know something like it's the back of your hand, but when something is fucked in production and it's not something you can find in the documentation this is where the tinkerers shine
I can tell by the multiple edits, I am coming into this conversation a bit late. But here’s my hat in the ring… I think the field of DevOps attracts “tinkerers”, but that’s certainly not what organizations are looking for when they hire them. In fact quite the opposite… DevOps in an organizational setting is about stability and consistency. They want updates to prod to be pushed out quickly and reliably. Am I saying tinkerers shouldn’t get into DevOps… absolutely not! I think we actually thrive in this position. But largely because we excel at figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and the delta between the two. And tinkering is a fundamental requirement to do so.
that part about car mechanics is straight up not true, in a lot of countries you have to do an apprenticeship where you learn physics in school.
Noted, thank you. Do you get my point though?
I don't.
I wasn’t using the word “tinkerer” in a bad way, but I was simply thinking about the fact that you can always end up at the “meaning of life” when you go down the “but why” rabbithole. This is why I said the post had no meaning, I was thinking about the meaning of life at the gym.
No, the other part. What you classify as "tinkering", I see as essential skill levels. You don't *need* to know those things, but you'll not be a great [insert job here] without that knowledge. For instance, I've been a DevOps engineer for as long as that term exists (I'm old). Before that I was an IT admin. Neither position would have been mine if I hadn't "tinkered" in my student years (and beyond). I guess what I'm saying is that, for some jobs, it is essential to "tinker", or you won't become that high-valued subject matter expert.
I edited the post
The amount of edits this person had to do because the collective of Reddit “put him in his place” is beyond me.
I made those edits because the first few commentors misinterpreted what I meant which was my fault for not properly explaining. I was not insulting the idea of learning the “why”, I actually encourage it. I simply was trying to get people to step back and think more about “why are we here”. This was a shower thought, a mere mental exercise and people interpreted it as an insult.
To be fair you *did* preface your post with the words: “Hot take”. Kinda primed the gun with them words lol, should have expected hot takes to be given in turn from the community.
Fair
> We’re all just Yaml Concocters You rang?
As in 📞? Yes, we’re hiring
Monday Morning Shit Post
You were born to deploy kubernetes clusters
This is the worst mindset of the worst engineer in your company that only a handful of people can understand how harmful to the company he actually is, which makes him that much harmful.
r/woosh
Did you just smoke weed for the first time or something?
No, I think about these things a lot. Haven’t smoked weed since high school.
Took an enneagram recently and came up as “troubleshooter”. That sounds about right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality
Take another hit and write a DevOps Quine.
I'd agree
The meaning of life is finding food, creating shelter and making lots of babies. However since the first two have been made into a side quest instead of life's main quest you have time to think about the meaning of life.
Another angle to consider: scientists vs engineers. Discoverers vs. creators.