Interesting how it was a climate activist that they used this on first. Not a sexual predator, bomber terrorist, human trafficker, or drug kingpin, the genuinely undoubtedly horrible kinds of people that the State tries to convince the public these surveillance legislation are targeting.
Cool, now can China invest in fixing 1000 upstream bugs in Gnome, KDE, Wayland, Pipewire, LibreOffice, NextCloud, Firefox, and so on? Also, could they develop open source drives and firmware for all the hardware they are exporting? I am not sarcastic. I just wonder why all this big players that use Linux create an own Distribution, but beside from that, not doing much.
Hwawei has been called out for KPI farming on the Linux kernel (i.e. lots of bogus contributions to boost their support numbers): https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/18/153
There's some more insight on this Hackernews thread where an ex-Samsung employee defends Hwawei and notes it's not intentionally KPI farming, but rather poor internal performance tools.
I would gladly be proven wrong, but a quick Google search doesn't discuss any concrete contributions Hwawei makes (only Git simple git diff metrics, which fall under the discussions linked above)
What do we think? Is IDG full of it? Is the industry trending toward DevOps? I suppose there's always the other options - hyper-specialize in a given technology, or move on to management. Or go start a goat farm or something.
I tried the "move on to management" thing. It wasn't for me.
The ways we work (and the ways we're compensated) do seem to be in some sort of rapid decay death spiral though. No one knows what it means yet, certainly not IDC. And that's not even what they're talking about, they're just talking about trends in how technology is being utilized. AI disrupted everything, and it's not done and THAT isn't even what they're talking about.
I’m a long-time university sysadmin, an area where people traditionally are responsible for a long list of unrelated technologies and piles of projects because of perennial understaffing. Automation in recent years has meant that a small number of us can manage a lot more by getting rid of recurring tasks, but at the same time, my department has been almost constantly hiring for the last couple years, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing. I think articles like this tend to overgeneralize by treating all industries as the same. There are obviously changes underway, and sysadmin roles may look different over time, but they’ve been talking in conferences about this transition for a fair number of years now. In education at least, the outcome thus far of a more DevOps way of looking at things is that we just get handed more to do, but can maybe actually handle it instead of just adding it to the pile.
Yes and no. The people that truly keep the lights on to critical systems I think are more insulated. I deal with active directory (and azure to an extent). I'm one of two engineers that are attuned to what is going on in AD in a 65k+ staffed company. I do other things than AD, but it needs care and feeding.
AD is going to stick around for a lot longer and may end up being in that cobol state where companies have it for critical things but there are few who truly understand how to work it.
Everyone else may end up in a DevOps-esque role. Then you have the scope of the industry too. I think this article overblows the premise it puts forth.
Westerners generally do not care much about privacy, democracy and critical thinking, and will attack whoever their government media dictates them to (foreign boogeymen like China/Russia/DPRK). We saw Americans calling Snowden a traitor, and Wikileaks a Russian op.
Today, its okay to ban exclusively Tiktok through RESTRICT ACT, a second coming of Patriot Act, but allow incomparably worse behaviours of indigenous surveillance social media companies because they work for NSA and CIA. Mind you, this includes Reddit with numerous US military/air force bases with redditor astroturfers.
Almost nothing. There was no public reaction countering Snowden's targeting with US state violence, violence that forced him to flee, let alone any forced reduction in domestic spying or secret police activity. Both have probably increased. Nevertheless, self-serving narratives of being "the city on a hill", a bastion of freedom and democracy, stay intact. It confirmed the biases of people who already knew this was likely happening, and those same people continue to be marginalized by an easily-propagandized public.
Well it can be a good idea... if you're looking to move on to those other options I mentioned (specialize, management, or goat farm). If you want to stay in the sysadmin space, I guess I'd still recommend automating, but with caution.
As a result, more tech workers find themselves in what IDC described as "hybrid roles that combine traditional development activities with activities that formerly were associated with operations professionals who historically had few or no development-oriented responsibilities."
I guess I've always been in what they're calling a 'hybrid role' because this doesn't seem like a new thing. Every good sysadmin I've worked with has some coding skills, not necessarily for developing software products but for solving IT problems. I can't tell if they're calling that 'development' or saying sysadmin need to learn to develop software products. Either way doesn't seem like they're talking about the same sector I'm familiar with.
theregister.com
Oldest