I am also enjoying the book currently, I really do like it although it's driven home the fact that I cannot get by (as a systems engineer) without low level programming knowledge and experience.
it's a strange feeling seeing the end of the line for your skills that took a decade of slow grinding to acquire.
I'm not sure I agree that you need low level programming knowledge and experience. The industry is huge, and there's needs for a lot of talent with a variety of skills.
If anything, I would argue that the need for the low level languages is disappearing for the general case. As "The Cloud" gets bigger and bigger, and the low level things are handled more and more by a service providers, and they abstract more and more of the day to day, it makes it easier for you to focus on higher level problems.
I do think that the days of being purely ops and needing nothing but shell scripting are going away though. You gotta pick up some python or similar at this point.
> I do think that the days of being purely ops and needing nothing but shell scripting are going away though. You gotta pick up some python or similar at this point.
Maybe 5-10 years down the line, but not this year or next.
I was feeling the exact same way about a year ago. The thing is, once you pick up a programming language, all of your other hard earned Ops skills are still very relevant and will become much more valuable.
Without learning some programming you will go the way of the dinosaur, but by learning a bit you can become significantly more effective than you were before.
I don't necessarily think we're at the end of the line for any skills, just perhaps at the beginning of the line (only time will tell) for a new type of split. Either way, existing knowledge seems not to be EOL, but rather complements skills that were traditionally kept separate.
Additionally, it always takes plenty of time for legacy systems and processes to become forgotten, so even for those who can't or simply don't want to adapt, I feel like there's plenty of work still out there at places where change must occur more slowly, or where long-term investments have been made.
it's a strange feeling seeing the end of the line for your skills that took a decade of slow grinding to acquire.