One of my hobbies is learning Yiddish. Growing up Jewish in Montreal, I attended a parochial elementary school that taught Yiddish (along with French and Hebrew), but dropped it after that. A couple of years ago, I discovered a Yiddish teacher in my local area and I started taking classes for fun.
Our teacher recently introduced us to a Yiddish expression, hintish-kloog, which translates literally as “dog smartness”. It refers to a dog’s ability to sniff out and locate food in all sorts of places.
This made me think of the kind of skill required to solve operational problems during the moment. It’s a very different kind of skill than, say, constructing abstractions during software development. Instead, it’s more about employing a set of heuristics to try to diagnose the issue, hunting through our dashboards to look for useful signals. “Did something change recently? Are errors up? Is the database healthy?”
My teacher noted that that many of the more religious Jews tend to look down on owning a dog, and so hintish-kloog is meant in a pejorative sense: this isn’t the kind of intelligence that is prized by scholars. This made me think about the historical difference in prestige between development and operations work, where skilled operations work is seen as a lower form of work than skilled development work.
I’m glad that this perception of operations is changing over time, and that more software engineers are doing the work of operating their own software. Dog smartness is a survival skill, and we need more of it.
Author’s note: I initially had the Yiddish wording incorrect, this post has been updated with the correct wording.
Surfing Complexity 