What would a full time "PowerShell Developer" actually do?

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nosferatoothz@reddit

We use PowerShell with ScriptRunner to automate across multiple teams.

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Jaki_Shell@reddit

Do you know the cost of that thing? Read multiple places that the pricing is extremely high

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nosferatoothz@reddit

ScriptRunner isn’t that expensive. We do a lot with it too.

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Professional_Mix2418@reddit

A full time PS developer would cry, be in therapy and wonder where they went so wrong that they can’t use *nix.

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vogelke@reddit

+1 for the username and the comment.

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Frothyleet@reddit

I can! It's easy to install powershell core on *nix :)

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Professional_Mix2418@reddit

Hehehe fair point well made. And ahem, yes I have it installed on my Mac as well. 😎

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That checks out, as soon as I went from mostly PS development to Linux and windows SysAdmin (I still do PS development just less) my therapy sessions dropped 🤣 i do work for a team that does things properly now and doesn't expect bespoke solutions though...

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Akamiso29@reddit

“But are the majority of Microsoft ecosphere System Admins just clicking their way through MMCs and M365 screens?” Yes. Then you have the ones like me that can scramble together stuff to do what they want. Ad hoc laziness making us embrace the far superior method for pulling data, etc. And then you have the people like you who have weaponized laziness into a career skill. But the majority are clickity clackity. This sub Reddit sometimes forgets that it’s the small minority of sysadmins out there who are willing to read about this stuff outside their working hours and an overwhelming number of global sysadmins are SA + however many tiers of helpdesk the company (usually the MSP) is trying to save money on by squishing together. They are pure click ops, baby.

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BitRunner64@reddit

It all depends on what you're trying to do. If I only have to repeat it for 10, maybe 15 accounts, I'll just raw dog it via the Admin center. If it's a more tedious and time consuming task, it's worth it spending the time to write a script.

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sedated_badger@reddit

Weaponized laziness is my favorite. They automate cause their manager puts a story on their board to do it. I automate cause I want to always do the least fucking work possible. We are not the same lol.

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root-node@reddit

I automate so that when it needs to be done over and over and over again, it's always going to produce the same result. Too many environments where servers/devices are built by hand and no two are alike.

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Raskuja46@reddit

I automate things because I find it to be the most engaging and rewarding work. I get something fun to do and other people get tools that make their jobs easier. I also think of it as freeing up their time so they can do the troubleshooting I don't want to be bothered with.

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sfc_scannow@reddit

It's the tech version of running economy.

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oubeav@reddit

Are you, me?

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rulebreaker@reddit

I automate because I don’t want to spend a fuck load of time doing some dumb shite. Then I move on to the next interesting thing, until the next boring task comes along, then I spend time automating it - which is way more rewarding and fun - instead of doing it. Next time the request comes in, management gets the results immediately, and I’m not bored.

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Insanely-Awesome@reddit

As a self-confessed "clickity clackity" who knows enough PS to get by, I am realizing that my frustration with dealing with 365 and Azure's-moving-target-never-in the-same-place-menus might be by design as it has been driving me to learn the PowerShell to bypass the GUI.

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Unable-Entrance3110@reddit

Same. Though, I have to ask, have you ever tried writing Graph API stuff in PowerShell? Talk about a moving target...

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tmontney@reddit

Seen this sentiment a lot on here and for someone who spends a modest amount of time leveraging Graph, I don't see it. I mean, yeah, I've run into issues and their documentation has been lacking. But nothing that would make me really hate it. Honestly, I'm glad Microsoft has Graph and am kinda surprised that it's provided with 365 licenses. Same can't be said for other platforms (looking at you, ADP).

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cosine83@reddit

Graph is just a slightly different paradigm for a lot of Powershell folks, which is where I imagine a lot of the headaches come from. It's hamfisting an API and its various endpoints into an object-based module and cmdlets. Some of the cmdlets are complete whereas some still rely on selecting data subobjects properly to get the outputs you want where just making the raw rest call is functionally the same. If you're not used to working with APIs via Invole-RestMethod, Graph is a bit cumbersome. If you have even a little bit of experience working with APIs, it makes a lot of sense and is very flexible. Just takes some finagling.

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Unable-Entrance3110@reddit

Don't get me wrong. Graph is great. I am just saying that I have not had very good experiences with the PowerShell documentation and Coplilot is right out.

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Responsible-Bread996@reddit

I'm a decade removed from windows admin-ing. But back then PoSH literally couldn't do everything that needed to be done at that time. So clicking through MMCs was required. The real frustrating part is they were removing some things from MMCs into PoSH only. So you were forced to do a bit of both. Knowing what I know about how windows "advances", I'd be surprised if there still isn't a weird mix between the two.

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TeddyRoo_v_Gods@reddit

I feel like every Windows admin should have a crash course in Linux. I did not appreciate what the terminal can do until I accidentally fell into a Linux admin position and had to rely on scripting and Ansible to do my job. I rely on PS a lot more now that I am in a hybrid environment. P.s: then again, we have a couple of kids on a team now who just install our distros with GUI so they can administer by clicking.

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PelosiCapitalMgmnt@reddit

My experience with windows admins vs linux admins is that the comfortability to automate is WAY different. In my past I setup a full powershell scripting and module lifecycle with helper modules written and deployment processes so windows admins could write a script, check it into git, and it would run when we needed it to. But getting a windows admin to not even invest time into learning git, but to acknowledge its better than manually copying files places, was a long battle. Working as well from a place that was mainly AWS with some Azure to pure Azure I learned just how bad the Az world is with powershell vs AWS. The skillset isn’t there, and I’ll be surprised if it becomes the standard as folks who enjoy automation and DevOps move over to the Unix primarily generally.

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sudonem@reddit

It’s true. Though the fact that in Linux “everything is a file”and nearly all configuration involves just editing config files and maybe restarting services means that Linux is (generally speaking) a lot easier to automate with scripting. Bash and Python are both really fucking excellent at file editing and text manipulation. Ansible is built on Python. So you start to see how the entire OS and ecosystem, in many ways, lends itself really well to automation and orchestration in a way that Windows apps & services often don’t. Then there’s the fact that it’s quite rare for orgs to hire “just a Linux sysadmin” anymore. The expectation is that you’ll be an engineer and architect and do it all with a smaller team than windows focused admins get. So… not having decent scripting / automation / orchestration chops just isn’t really an option. I love it though. I legitimately just prefer working in Linux (even at home) but also… all this time specializing has been worth it because these days I never have to touch Entra or M365 and I couldn’t tell you the last time I had to field tickets from the average end user 🙃

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swissbuechi@reddit

> I never have to touch Entra or M365 There are some nice tools available to push a more IaC based approach which can provide an awesome working environment that only includes minimal flanky ClickOps UI interactions. And it scales pretty well too. OpenTofu (Graph or product specific modules), CIPP (controlled by GitOps) or M365DSC just to name a few I've made great experiences with.

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sudonem@reddit

Rad. Happy to hear it. (I will still move mountains to avoid being a windows engineer 😬)

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swissbuechi@reddit

M365 is cross-platform and I actually prefer managing macOS haha.

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SevaraB@reddit

It’s funny that we complain about Windows “de bloat” scripts when the OS just starts off on the wrong footing right from go. Developers are usually at least thinking about the possibility of scaling right from go, and the OS licensing just isn’t scalable. If their license terms weren’t so restrictive, they wouldn’t have lost out all the virtualization to Linux, then Docker and Kubernetes that pretty much sets Alpine as the gold standard off-the-shelf distro for scaling workloads. The comfort level isn’t there because Windows *is* tech debt. Anybody basing their deployments on real numbers can see that Windows priced themselves out of the market.

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mirrax@reddit

> pretty much sets Alpine as the gold standard off-the-shelf distro for scaling workloads. Alpine hasn't been the gold standard. In the early container days, worries about musl/apk made it controversial and with Copy On Write filesystems there wasn't really any gains over other distros. And in the modern day the recommendation is minimal images like distroless, so that teams aren't chasing useless CVEs and have a reduced shell-less attack surface.

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Dry_Quality_6846@reddit

I do Windows DevOps. IMO, this mentality is the difference between making 100-150k doing typical windows admin clickops vs 200-300k doing more devops/automation/cloud focused work.

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Hamburgerundcola@reddit

So true. I started my apprenticeship in IT (switzerland) at 15yo. Finished it at 19 and now I am 20. Made it my mission at year 2 to learn powershell, still am very novice at it but somehow at powershelling I outskill most people I've worked with so far.

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OptimalCynic@reddit

Write incredibly verbose, almost unreadable reports

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Darkhigh@reddit

Hit tab a lot?

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RumpleDorkshire@reddit

The GUIs are just easier most of the time. For large changes or anything repetitive that will take longer than an hour or two I’ll just script it. I admit I am not a powershell nerd but I’ve been using it for a decade so I can find something online (or via AI) and understand the code enough to tailor it to my needs. Sometimes though it takes more time getting a script working than it would to just manually bang out the same changes via the gui.

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SikhGamer@reddit

> But are the majority of Microsoft ecosphere System Admins just clicking their way through MMCs and M365 screens? Yes. OMG Yes.

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hops_on_hops@reddit

Yeah absolutely. Users comfortable with command line, even at the IT admin level, are extremely rare in the windows world.

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Evening_Hawk_3382@reddit

Don't nobody confuse this with OMGYes.

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Nik_Tesla@reddit

I have the same rule of thumb about scripting repeat tasks, but the IT world is so poorly documented that I often times have to use the GUI to poke around looking to see what is available. If I am in discovery/learning mode, I use the GUI. If I know exactly what I need to accomplish, the cli/powershell.

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Relative_Test5911@reddit

I do a fair bit with PowerShell and Power Automate to create automations in Sharepoint Online and SharePoint On Prem. I mostly use the Graph API to integrate our internal systems into SharePoint also to manage and admin the system (think user creation etc). My role is a lot more admin focused though rather than Dev. It is def not clicking through screens (hence the automation), but there is a lot of that as well.

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itishowitisanditbad@reddit

> It is def not clicking through screens (hence the automation), but there is a lot of that as well. What do you mean? The sky def isn't blue, but there is a lot of blue. Y'know?

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Relative_Test5911@reddit

Sorry that was badly worded - what I meant was that writing automations and integrations is not just clicking through screens, but there is also a lot of clicking through screens in general.

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mariachiodin@reddit

I follow the same pattern, more than three times it gets scripted. I am very lazy

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pdp10@reddit

By the "zero, one, infinity" rule, everything used more than once would be scripted.

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Xibby@reddit

A full time PowerShell developer would get a Claude Code subscription and automate the hell out of things. For me. Claude Code is turning stuff I estimate at 8-16 hours into 2-4 hours. More hours means more features and more odd edge cases being caught and handled.

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theFather_load@reddit

How accurate do you find AI these days? Is it something like 50% generating / 50% proof checking it?

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pdp10@reddit

The smaller and more-prescribed the task, the better and easier-to-externally-validate the results.

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raffey_goode@reddit

claude is pretty good. i don't input company data so i just have it do placeholder shit until i go through and edit it, therefore i also have to read the scripts through. i don't do anything that isn't debugged first.

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Frothyleet@reddit

Depends on the subject, the prompting, the LLM, and the context you give it. From what I can tell, we're far away from a world where you can really "vibe code" and not understand the code/scripting that you are being suggested. At least if you care about what actually happens, of course.

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pdp10@reddit

> get used to using AI assistance This reminds me of when electronic documentation could be included on the install CD-ROM, making for a perfectly logical reason not to include a costly and often-unused printed manual. Then the next thing you know, we're all reliant on third-party HOWTOs and searched-up snippets, to do the things we used to find easily in the index of the manual. Even man pages are often short on usable examples and quick references. So now it's going to be LLMs that are the reason for not documenting anything, any more.

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outpin@reddit

Is there a message limit on Claude Code? I tried the free version and was impressed, I was struggling with some code I needed to for a power automate flow and Claude had a working version in 5 minutes, compared to numerous chats with ChatGPT on the paid version.

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Frothyleet@reddit

You either have to be on a subscription plan (Pro or Max), or pay for API credits. I have only used API credits (since I wanted to try it out and I could start with just $5, versus $20 for a monthly subscription). From what I hear, if you are a Pro user, you'll start getting throttled if you are a heavy user, but I have no real context for that. I will say that the $3 worth of script refactoring I have done with Claude has really impressed me. And my Git commit comments now have actual substance instead of being "asdifdfa" or "butts"!

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chrusic@reddit

As far as I know Claude Code is only available for paid tiers. Claude Pro is the one I use, and it does have sometimes quite strict limits. But I'm not using it optimally at all, so I'm sure there are ways to get your limit to last longer. The pricing for higher tier limits get steep fast. But again, if the usecase is there it might be worth it.

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jrockmn@reddit

Is Claude Code that much better than using Copilot?

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PhoenixVSPrime@reddit

Copilot is the worst of them all. Even chat gpt is better at Microsoft ecosystem than copilot

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jrockmn@reddit

Interesting,it’s always worked for what I was doing

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PhoenixVSPrime@reddit

They constantly reference outdated modules and it hallucinates complete more than any other ai. Use it enough and you'll see it

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fadingcross@reddit

Is flying a F-35 really that much better than driving a Lada?   There's no comparing. CoPilot is even dog shit compared to what it's based on - ChatGPT. And Claude is significantly better than ChatGPT because the latter is super scared of telling you you're wrong since all the normies use that one they've had to put in so many safeguards it's not even funny.

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Schaas_Im_Void@reddit

YES

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_shellsort_@reddit

Suffer. They would suffer.

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PedroAsani@reddit

Between 2007 and 2015 was my peak PowerShell scripting. What killed it was a combination of position shift and the introduction of MS Graph. I don't need to do sysadmin as much, and the lack of documentation on that shitty API means I don't have the patience for it now. I want a one to one parallel for each old command. I don't want to have to relearn everything by brute force because Microsoft neglected to release full documentation.

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spamyak@reddit

Seems they've more or less fixed it with [the new module](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/entra-powershell/overview?view=entra-powershell). You will want to `Enable-EntraAzureADAlias`

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Frothyleet@reddit

>and the lack of documentation on that shitty API means I don't have the patience for it now. This is the part that is so fucking frustrating. Every endpoint is documented, insofar as they are listed and the explanation is just the goddam verbatim name. I'm OK with Graph being a big syntactic and functional change from the classic APIs that were wrappered in PS modules, if only because it largely aligns with modern REST standards. But it's so fucking frustrating trying to figure out something as simple as the expected syntax for a "-Filter" or "-Search" parameter, especially when 95% of the documentation doesn't even include samples!

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gblfxt@reddit

I'm full time, I manage a suite of automation tools run from Powershell Universal for a team of database and sysadmins. A lot of troubleshooting current scripts and creating/optimizing workflows and script requests.

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Dry_Quality_6846@reddit

I do Windows DevOps. I'm not a full time PowerShell Developer, but since I manage a fleet of 5000+ Windows Servers globally, almost any interaction I do with the Windows Server is done through PowerShell. (Some of my better coworkers are able to full on write c# Windows Services). I also heavily work with infrastructure as code in AWS, leveraging typescript w/ aws CDK (ew). Do some python and node.js for the lambda code as well (don't use powershell lambdas lol). At my first job, I was the only one able to create PowerShell scripts and had to get my manager and coworker onboard with basics of PowerShell scripting, before that they were all click ops.. Some of the stuff I created there are still in use today lol

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omn1p073n7@reddit

I automate processes and tasks, functionalize everything then send it up to Azure Devops to be packaged as a module and published to our nuget feed. I then have task master servers download those functions and run said automation, used to be with task scheduler but these days with ActiveBatch. As for actual tasks, you name it SCCM Config Items, asset tracking, reporting, API calls, weird backup configs, tool-making for helpdesk and operations team, install packaging, migrations. I also spend a lot of time training others how to use PowerShell. Sometimes I find noisy processes that take tech's time and energy, put a plan in place to streamline them then having business managers say "but this is how we've always done it" and then watching the people who actually bear the weight of those decisions struggle.

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yazzanz@reddit

What are you doing in PowerShell for asset tracking?

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omn1p073n7@reddit

API calls to SnipeIT

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Dry_Quality_6846@reddit

It's the difference between making 100-150k and making 200k+.

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AdeelAutomates@reddit

Funny enough. That's exactly the content I have been developing education around (PowerShell on Azure, M365, etc): [Adeel Automates - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@AdeelAutomates/videos) Here is what it means to automate full time with PowerShell

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yazzanz@reddit

Subscribed! Thanks for creating. I can’t wait to get started

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Ok-Reindeer1702@reddit

Subscribed. Love these type of videos, keep em coming.

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lucas_gdno@reddit

PowerShell devs are basically the glue between all the Microsoft services that don't talk to each other properly. At my last gig we had one guy whose entire job was writing PS modules to sync data between on-prem AD and various cloud services because the native sync tools kept breaking. He spent most of his time reverse engineering undocumented APIs and writing error handling for when Microsoft randomly changed endpoints without telling anyone. The rest of us just used his modules and pretended we understood what was happening under the hood.

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fadingcross@reddit

>But are the majority of Microsoft ecosphere System Admins just clicking their way through MMCs and M365 screens? Yes. The majority of sysadmins can't code, and that's a huge problem because the roles you described will very soon be replaced by AI Agents, MCP Agents are becoming scary good scary fast.

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ExceptionEX@reddit

In my experience even 100% Microsoft shops, there are very few that know more than the basics of powershell. I find a lot of long way solutions, and a lot of others are really good at finding scripts that do what they need, sometimes tweaking them a bit, and with GenAi there are a lot of them getting things done that way. I'm sure others mileage may vary, but unless someone had some dev background or is just really good at their job, their powershell usage is limited, and never an rarely and actual role.

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eman0821@reddit

I wouldn't call that developer which is a bit of stretch. It's simply just IT Ops automation which isn't anything new in IT especially for Systems roles. Most Sysadmins today automate very heavily across multiple platforms using powershell for Windows Server Administration and Azure to Ansible, Bash and Python Scripting for Linux, cloud and automation. That's all normal Sysadmin skills. I don't know of any modern sysadmin today mouse clicking through menus which is very efficient by today's stands when managing a complex farm of servers. Unless you are managing only two servers for a tiny company, manual work is extremely rare.

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Murhawk013@reddit

I agree modern sysadmins SHOULD have those skills, but everywhere I’ve been none of them have it, it’s actually baffling.

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Tekashi-The-Envoy@reddit

Develop powershell full-time

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Legionof1@reddit

Probably work from India.

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Russ3ll@reddit

> But are the majority of Microsoft ecosphere System Admins just clicking their way through MMCs and M365 screens? No, I suspect most Windows SysAdmins worth their salt automate, to varying degrees, as you have. I'll be honest, I've never heard of a "Powershell Developer" as a title, but it sounds like you're plenty qualified.

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