Let’s Not Forget System Administration

In my novel Growing Future Operators, I argue for teaching DevSecOps to grade schoolers. Something happened at my day job last week, which made me think we need three areas of technology teaching.

 A few months ago, we hired a young system administrator with Linux skills to work on the DevOps team, which focuses on AWS deployments. Our system administrator had no experience with cloud (AWS, Azure, Google), and he has had a hard time since joining our company.

 This is the first time he has had to use Terraform or Ansible. He has been drowning in tasks related to those tools or AWS, and the learning curve has been too steep. Ubuntu Linux is the only area he has excelled in.

 In my novel, I remind people that the tech world is full of people without computer science degrees. System engineers often use Terraform and Ansible. There is some coding with those tools, but it is much simpler than writing code with Java, Python, or Go.

Our Linux administrator's struggle is Terraform and Ansible, which require coding skills he doesn’t have. Also, not knowing clouds hit him hard. In his last job, placing a new server into their data center required weeks to receive the hardware and install the software needed. In AWS, you only need minutes to set up a new server. If you do your automation well, as soon as the AWS server is up and running, it has everything it needs. The speed bothered him, too. Things were moving too fast.

The Linux administrator has found a new job that wants his Linux skills, and they do not plan to use a cloud. This is his last week with us.

 In my novel, I make the case for computer science skills differing from system engineering skills. System administration skills also vary from computer science and system engineering skills. I often view this in terms of code. If you love code, computer science is for you. If you don’t like the complexity of the languages I mentioned earlier but have a little coding skill, systems engineering is for you. If you hate all coding languages and prefer shell scripts, system administration is for you.

 While researching my novel, I found hundreds of schools offering computer science courses, but nothing for systems engineering or system administration. Why not? If we required students to take one course each, they would be better off. At an early age, they would learn which path works for them. Forcing every student to be a software engineer assumes they have the skill. If you show them multiple paths in technology and many paths outside technology, they can make better decisions in the future.

These don’t need to be full-year courses. If you limit each class to one semester, students will get to test each out before we commit them to what they want to do in high school or college. When I was at school, they required us to take foreign language and woodworking classes. Why can’t we do that with technology classes?

 In today’s world, I would teach students Linux and Windows. Windows now has the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL). Having skills in both operating systems would help modern system administrators. In my day job, we only use Windows as the internal identity provider (IdP) by implementing Active Directory. Our SaaS platform is all Ubuntu Linux. This helps because system engineering teams are often significant these days because of the workload for those teams.

 We haven’t even talked about containers, which system engineering also handles. A system administrator who can do both is valuable because one person can do two jobs.

 If you keep this to one semester for each technology, you can teach it in seventh and eighth grades or first and second years in high school. That would leave a one-semester course available. Would you be willing to fill that slot with a creative writing course?

 Few technologists write well because they don’t teach writing to engineers. The creative writing course at Boston University made me work on my writing. I am a novelist today because taking the class convinced me I could write, so I never turned down a chance to write blog posts or white papers for my jobs. I have never used the French or woodworking I learned in high school.

 Let's also realize that many students have zero interest in technology. Those might be our future nurses, historians, librarians, etc. Don't force students into technology.

 That is why we should teach something like this as early as possible. Give the students a try at three technology paths and let them choose one or a non-technology path.  No path is wrong. Let the students decide. Their chances for success grow higher if they are doing something they love.