Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 days agoI 100% agree.
The best mechanics can track down an issue by reasoning about what could be causing it, and understanding how pistons work can help deduce whether that knocking is actually the engine or something else entirely. They probably didn’t learn that from their official training, but instead worked with some guy who used to work at a car manufacturer or something and picked their brain.
The best engineers are curious and jump on opportunities to learn more.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Same principle works with IT. I do and have done sysadmin stuff for quite a while and there’s always some random software or whatever I’ve never heard of and someone comes and asks me to fix it. Then you start to ask questions, “what exactly doesn’t work”, “can you show me what you’re doing”, “what should happen when you press that button”, “can you show settings on that thing” and so on. Then you can start to dig down, does the server they’re using respond to ping, does DNS resolve (it’s always DNS after all), does that thing work on the next workstation, when did the problem appear and was there some other maintenance or changes going on at that time and so on.
Same principle, just start to reason the whole thing from bottom up, check everything you come across untill you find something which doesn’t work and then do what’s needed to fix that, rinse and repeat until the problem goes away and make sure that what you’re doing won’t cause new problems. Just the tools are different, the mindset is more or less the same.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Exactly! If you know enough foundational principles, you can quickly rule things out and develop ways to narrow down what remains. If you rely too much on diagnostic tools, you’ll miss out when the tools fail to catch something odd.
I’m a software engineer and we had a problem where our corporate laptop wouldn’t allow us to install our dev tools (needed to debug a windows specific integration and we dev on macos). Instead of waiting a week for IT to come fix it, I realized we just needed it to look like a service was running locally, and we had ssh through the git bash shell, so I set up an SSH tunnel between the windows system and the dev machine and they were able to keep working while waiting for IT to get time to help us. We rarely use SSH at work, but I understand enough about how networks and sockets work so I was able to quickly help them solve the problem.
You don’t get that type of intuition if you don’t understand how the underlying tech works, and that’s true regardless of your field.