> I have a personal theory that software developers have developed severe tunnel vision about code in the last 10-15 years. Before then, most developers had some knowledge about deployment practices, shell scripts, apache, that sort of thing. They roughly understood how something like a web server worked; writing a toy one was in many CS curricula.
You're describing a period (well, not far off - maybe a little earlier) when the norm was to chuck a .war file over the wall to a sysadmin team who'd plug it into tomcat, and who absolutely definitely wouldn't give you access to the server and you had to ask very nicely to even see logs when it broke. The tunnel vision has always been there, as long as the hiring environment has thought that specialism is a good thing.
What's needed is for people to do more time in tiny orgs where there's no room not to learn how everything works, and where there's no space for complicated solutions that don't fit in one person's head.
You're describing a period (well, not far off - maybe a little earlier) when the norm was to chuck a .war file over the wall to a sysadmin team who'd plug it into tomcat, and who absolutely definitely wouldn't give you access to the server and you had to ask very nicely to even see logs when it broke. The tunnel vision has always been there, as long as the hiring environment has thought that specialism is a good thing.
What's needed is for people to do more time in tiny orgs where there's no room not to learn how everything works, and where there's no space for complicated solutions that don't fit in one person's head.