this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
695 points (98.3% liked)

Programmer Humor

19563 readers
927 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Nailed it. I think about this a lot: a sysadmin is basically a manager of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers. But management is a poor way of orchestrating human labor; small teams usually operate better without management. So, is there a better way to administer computer systems as well?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Since computers, unlike humans, lack intuition, I doubt that computers could organise themselves. So there probably always has to be a sysadmin, even if the sysadmin is a computer themself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Span of control is always an issue. There's a reason why it varies heavily from team/org.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

That's a really interesting question, I don't know what that might look like.

As a biochemist, my brain naturally goes to the different hierarchical levels of increasing complexity in life. Like how eukaryotic amoebas are freed from some of the challenges that constrain bacteria (mitochondria really are awesome), and how similarly, the complexity ceiling is much higher for multicellular life than unicellular life.

I just think a systems view of stuff is neat, and it's cool to see how modularisation, coupling and specialisation work together