I'm a newbie exploring the Asian job market and I've noticed there's not a strong demand for system administrators. I see a lot of job postings for RTOS programmers and embedded engineers, and even higher-level positions often require sysadmin skills along with proficiency in C++. The 'Linux support engineer' roles seem to ask for many more qualifications than those in North America or Europe. I'm curious, how much of your daily tasks involve programming or writing scripts?
5 Answers
For me, programming is super important! I spend a lot of my time crafting Ansible playbooks, Python scripts, and using Terraform. I've actually found that I do a lot less shell scripting than I expected, as Python tends to be my go-to. Even though I do quite a bit of scripting, I wouldn’t say I’m a software engineer – it’s more about automation than software development. I like to keep it simple and focused, mostly creating small scripts for automation rather than large applications.
In my experience, programming has become critical in my career evolution. When they downsized my department, I found coding jobs everywhere, and I’m glad I kept those skills sharp! In fact, I spend around 30% of my day programming, and it certainly enhances my effectiveness as an engineer.
These days, you're more of an automation engineer than just a systems engineer. Writing scripts to automate your work is pretty much essential. It’s all about making your life easier by automating repetitive tasks.
Scripting is quite vital! I think without the ability to whip up scripts (like in Python, Perl, or Bash), my job would get really tough. However, don't expect to develop large projects; it’s mainly about creating smaller scripts to streamline tasks.
I totally agree! For me, it's not about being a programmer, but understanding programming concepts is key. Knowing how to manage environments and use version control is crucial too.
I've transitioned from software engineering to infrastructure, and coding still plays a big role in my work! I mainly deal with integrations, whether it's setting up APIs or handling data. My workflow is heavily dependent on writing scripts, usually not exceeding a thousand lines of code. I prefer languages like Go and Python over Bash because they feel more robust for automation tasks.
That’s interesting! I've wondered about bash versus Ansible. Why choose one over the other?