I applied for a sysadmin position and I’m afraid I’ve bitten off far more than I can chew.

For some reason most programmers think they can be good sysadmins because programming is “harder.” Then they try it and become disillusioned right quick. Most fail at being sysadmins because they are completely different skills and require totally different types of thinking.

However, I’ve seen absurdities on Hacker News like, “Why do we need all these networking guys? I found my IP address at the command line easily.”

And, “Why do we need DBAs? I installed Microsoft SQL Sever and it was just ‘click, click, click.'”

The depths of cluelessness there is astounding. They see being a sysadmin the same way. But in a lot of ways programmers are the physicists of the IT world. They believe their insight into programming allows them to know and understand everything in less than a second that takes mere mortals years to learn and get truly skilled at. And, as with physicists, they are completely, totally, laughably wrong.

Not all programmers are this way. But most are.