

Xenophobia and Elitism in the SysAdmin Community - MPSimmons
http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2010/08/xenophobia-and-elitism-in-the-community/

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gaius
You'll find that a _professional_ sysadmin (or DBA, or network engineer) is
technologically conservative for the simple reason that he or she is
personally responsible for uptime, and gets paged at 3am when there's a
problem, and more than likely uptime is a metric that feeds into their bonus
calculation.

That's not fear of change. It's the experience to step beyond the technnology
and see the bigger picture. The company's systems aren't a playground, they
are the machinery of production. Proven technology, even if it's "obsolete"
according to the blogosphere, rules in this world. Calling such people names
just betrays inexperience.

~~~
Confusion
I don't understand why you think the article is against conservatism or even
advocating using the latest fad. I read it as saying that Solaris sysadmins
tend to disregard the tools and methods of Linux sysadmins (as a possible
concrete example; I'm making it up on the spot, because the article doesn't
give any concrete examples of the sort)

~~~
nailer
Agreed. Additionally, most sysadmin work in first-world countries these days
is infrastructure programming - first and second line support is inevitably
handled offshore.

Writing a 20 line Perl script to do 'date -I' or not wishing to learn a new
language to simplify sharing of code because it's been 15 years since you last
learnt a new language isn't conservatism, it's fear of the unknown.

------
fgf
xenophobia |ˌzēnəˈfōbēə; ˌzenə-| noun intense or irrational dislike or fear of
people from other countries : racism and xenophobia are steadily growing in
Europe. DERIVATIVES xenophobe |ˈzēnəˌfōb; ˈzenə-| |ˈzinəˈfoʊb| |ˈzɛnəˈfoʊb|
noun xenophobic |-ˈfōbik| |ˈzinəˈfoʊbɪk| |ˈzɛnəˈfoʊbɪk| adjective

The subject of the article was not what I expected.

~~~
Confusion
You should have looked in some more dictionaries. That definition is too
strict.

Merrian-Webster:

    
    
      fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything
      that is strange or foreign
    

Dictionary.com:

    
    
      an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers
      or of that which is foreign or strange.
    

Yourdictionary.com:

    
    
      fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything
      foreign or strange
    

Cambridge Advanced Learners dictionary:

    
    
      extreme dislike or fear of foreigners, their customs,
      their religions, etc.

~~~
alnayyir
No, it's just descriptivist trash and proper use of the language.

More like, should've looked it up in the dictionary and found _neophobia_.

Intellectual laziness is not just cause for using words improperly.

~~~
Confusion
_Neophobia_ is not the correct word to use, because it's not necessarily about
_new_ things. Not even about things new to a specific person. Some BSD admin
may irrationally and violently dislike Linux variants of his tools.

It's always nice to have a proper word available, but sometimes it just
doesn't exist. If you can think of a clear, succinct description to replace 'a
xenophobic attitude' when you want to say someone is irrationally negative
about something and you think it's because of the unfamiliarity of the thing,
then I'm listening.

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tomjen3
I get these might lead to bad things, but it is also a very useful tool - you
can discard a lot of ideas this way without having to examine them in detail
(which takes far too much time) and you loose very little.

As for elitism, I never had much issue with that - who would you rather get
advice from - Kissinger or Sara Palin?

