Is this true?
tptacek: I spent the first part of my career as a "server guy" (along with networks). I ran tech at a popular ISP in Chicago called EnterAct.I spent the next part of my career as a developer, first at a security company, then at a streaming multicast company I founded, then at a network managment company.I spent the next part of my career as an almost full-time security researcher for hire, with a pronounced focus on high-end enterprise technology (SAN, WAN compression, replication, database, storage).Looking at it from all three angles, I'd say: there's definitely something to this. Being a programmer gave me insight into how systems worked. Being a security researcher gave me even more insight (I had projects that were literally months spent reverse engineering equipment firmware and building protocol test suites).I'm confident that after all this "insight", I knew more about how, say, iSCSI worked than any SAN administrator in Chicago.So, how would I have done as a manager of a SAN array? Terribly!The things that actually matter in administration --- understanding the processes that need to be in place to make changes, understanding what kinds of changes will occur, understanding what's a typical kind of failure that will just take a couple hours to diagnose versus what kinds of problems mean that your vendor is putting engineers on an airplane --- those things you learn by being in the operational/engineering role.To excel in the operational/engineering role, you need to dedicate yourself to the things that matter for that role, and not allow yourself to get distracted by shiny things. Developers and researchers: prone to distraction by shiny things!What I don't think is true is that strong tech people are predisposed to one of these roles or the other. Could I be a strong ops/engineering person again? I think so. But I know I can't do it while I'm doing this job.