Comment by Muromec

2 days ago

You still need to have somebody half competent to ask the electric shaitan to the thing and validate the result and also demonstrate this ability during the hiring process. I'm not sure it's easier than actually finding a person who can do those two lines.

5 comments

Muromec

Reply
ndriscoll  2 days ago

If you trust someone to manage IT policy in the first place I'd think they'd be smart enough to be able to learn the basics of Nix? Like 95%+ of it is just declaring obvious settings that are already in nixpkgs. In practice it's mostly an ini file, but with the power to do more if you need it.

bigyabai  2 days ago

Nix is declarative, the sum of work required to proliferate these updates is typing "git push" into your terminal.

  • Muromec  1 day ago

    That's before it is introduced into the government or a bank. Those environment tend to turn every trivial thing into a multi year project.

    It takes three really nice and cleverly designed things that are all very easy to use separately. Then you put those things into the hands of smart, bored and slightly undercompensated people and divide those people into four separate departments so they don't ever talk with each other.

    Then you introduce a fourth thing into the mix, let it ferment for a while and make sure some people dealing with the first three leave the building and are replaced with total imbeciles who have no idea what they are doing and also never say no to any silly idea of their boss.

    Then you ask to change something. Anything really. And it for some magical reason unbeknown to anybody involved at this point takes a few years.