tl;dr: different people think differently, and that doesn't mean they're stupid.
I'm exactly like the person you describe, arethuza.
I've been a sysadmin for 15 years, and am fantastic at what I do and am highly sought after by recruiters and so on and so forth. I started as a programmer, and I've never stopped programming, mostly for fun but my job regularly requires scripting, of course, and I'm great at it. I also really enjoy writing test automation and release automation, and I'm fantastic at those, too.
I can't design a program from scratch to save my life. I've never been able to. When I try, what comes out is absolute garbage, and usually extremely hostile to being actually used by actual people.
If I stick with a piece of non-trivial from-scratch code, I can usually get it to the point of being useful, but it takes 5+ iterations of near-total rewrites.
The basic issue, which is much like the original article, is that I just can't see the end result in my head, at all. If I have a system I need to change, seeing the end result of the system + my one change is easy. But when I try to imagine a complete system in my head (or on paper or whatever) it just ... fails. What I have in my head is much simpler than reality requires, and frequently wrong in major respects. I don't know why and I've never been able to fix it. At this point I've basically given up; when I need a high level design, I get someone else to write it, and then I fill it in.
If you give me a program where all the functions definitions and what they're supposed to do is written out, but nothing else, what I give back to you will be amazing. But if you tell me to write a program that does X, what I give back to you will be crap. This potentially has impact on my career advancement, but so far I've been able to do well by simply stating clearly that these are my limits, and I can be most effectively used in role X that doesn't cause trouble with these limits.
As a large customer considering moving to tarsnap, there is one area in which they have no functional competitors I have been able to find: scriptable (i.e. command line based) remote backup with decent deduplication. All of the cheaper options I've found that have deduplication support are GUI based; we simply have too many VMs, and they change to often, for that to be tenable for us at all.
I'm assuming you mean deduplication among your own data, in which case, wouldn't compression take care of it? I haven't used tarsnap, what's the benefit over duplicity?
EDIT: Oh, you mean deduplication of files between separate backup sets? That is a nice feature, true.
It is, and tarsnap does it really, REALLY well. I'm backing up what is, on disk, umm... (checks emails) about 15GiB, and I'm currently spending about 8 cents a day. Now if he'd just implement de-dupe across machines on a given account... :)
"This simple offering gives you complete control over organization, compression, deduplication, versioning and meta-data. You are NOT locked into a particular application or protocol, and there are no constraints on file sizes, retention, or access."
Which is great if you can find something that will do deduplication for you and encrypt and handle that the disk isn't actually local. I couldn't.
Also, rsync.net is significantly more expensive than tarsnap in my experience.
I'm exactly like the person you describe, arethuza.
I've been a sysadmin for 15 years, and am fantastic at what I do and am highly sought after by recruiters and so on and so forth. I started as a programmer, and I've never stopped programming, mostly for fun but my job regularly requires scripting, of course, and I'm great at it. I also really enjoy writing test automation and release automation, and I'm fantastic at those, too.
I can't design a program from scratch to save my life. I've never been able to. When I try, what comes out is absolute garbage, and usually extremely hostile to being actually used by actual people.
If I stick with a piece of non-trivial from-scratch code, I can usually get it to the point of being useful, but it takes 5+ iterations of near-total rewrites.
The basic issue, which is much like the original article, is that I just can't see the end result in my head, at all. If I have a system I need to change, seeing the end result of the system + my one change is easy. But when I try to imagine a complete system in my head (or on paper or whatever) it just ... fails. What I have in my head is much simpler than reality requires, and frequently wrong in major respects. I don't know why and I've never been able to fix it. At this point I've basically given up; when I need a high level design, I get someone else to write it, and then I fill it in.
If you give me a program where all the functions definitions and what they're supposed to do is written out, but nothing else, what I give back to you will be amazing. But if you tell me to write a program that does X, what I give back to you will be crap. This potentially has impact on my career advancement, but so far I've been able to do well by simply stating clearly that these are my limits, and I can be most effectively used in role X that doesn't cause trouble with these limits.