In my experience, "devops" is just employer-speak for "We're too cheap to hire proper sysops or DBAs, so we'll expect you to do everything yourself."
DevOps is a culture, not a role
41–50 of 139 posts
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#42"DevOps Engineer" is simply just title inflation. In 2017, there's literally _no_ difference between the outcomes expected from a "Systems Engineer" and a "DevOps Engineer" - both are expected to produce HA, Automated, Well Documented Infrastructure, to allow developers to run their code. Anyone not doing that is just a _bad_ "Systems Engineer" Developers don't call themselves "Agile Developers" because they started…
> In 2017, there's literally _no_ difference between the outcomes expected from a "Systems Engineer" and a "DevOps Engineer" I don't find the title 'Systems Engineer' to be in widespread usage at tech startups in SV, so I'm not sure what to expect from one. To be honest, I would expect Systems Engineers to be working on hardware. The infrastructure automation work done at modern tech startups is best described by the…
"Systems Engineer" seems to be an overloaded term. In the area I work in (applied R&D, East coast) the role is a mix of the software architect and QA, but encompassing both hardware and software.
Some science background (whichever science is relevant to the project) but mostly a lot of experience in general engineering practices (what generally works, how things break, what is sufficient to test to feel good that a unit will still work when moved from point A to point B, etc.). Many have software skills, but some do not. It is generally a high level role so not all projects have one even part time, but those that do tend to have it scoped roughly the same.
Projects that deal with field work / tests, especially bringing stuff to faraway / hard to get to places tend to value systems engineers (defined as above) highly and almost always have one at least part time. Just my experience.
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#43"DevOps Engineer" is simply just title inflation. In 2017, there's literally _no_ difference between the outcomes expected from a "Systems Engineer" and a "DevOps Engineer" - both are expected to produce HA, Automated, Well Documented Infrastructure, to allow developers to run their code. Anyone not doing that is just a _bad_ "Systems Engineer" Developers don't call themselves "Agile Developers" because they started…
It is not the engineers that call themselves 'Devops'. It's the recruiters and managers. Every engineer that I know that holds the 'Devops' title hates it, but has no choice in it.
I've observed this, but it depends on experience level.
Folks with <5 years experience, tend to enjoy the DevOps portion of their title. Whereas, neckbeards with a deep background tend to dislike it.
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
memory footprint, performance,different "runtime" etc ?
And how these affect operator's workflow? That is, the ways an operator interacts with the tools? The facts that Java is garbage collected or that it runs on virtual machine don't fundamentally change how programmers write code in it compared to e.g. C++. It's the same type of tool ("paradigm"). Erlang, however, is substantially different.
You are comparing apples to oranges (in my opinion of course).
I would say it's often hardly about just "operating" the machine. You need to know how the machine works how it can affect other machines and what can you do if parts of the machine break.
Not only that but also how many operators you can find, how many additional modules (libs) are there and how often you need to oil the wheels. Sure the implementation of the known algorithms will be similar in Java and C++ but the overall usage and how it connects with everything (aka the workflow) will be very different.
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#45Related, I've found that the term devops is too poisoned to be used effectively when hiring. It brings out charlatans in far greater numbers than anything else at the moment. Garden variety technician level folks who self inflate their titles and roles to try to jump from 60k to 100k overnight.
It's been frustrating as they're able to get things syntactically correct for the most part that they get through early phone screening but absolutely fall apart once they reach someone with technical expertise, wasting everyone's times.
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#46Related, I've found that the term devops is too poisoned to be used effectively when hiring. It brings out charlatans in far greater numbers than anything else at the moment. Garden variety technician level folks who self inflate their titles and roles to try to jump from 60k to 100k overnight. It's been frustrating as they're able to get things syntactically correct for the most part that they get through early phon…
Sounds like you need a new/retooled hiring process
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#47"DevOps Engineer" is simply just title inflation. In 2017, there's literally _no_ difference between the outcomes expected from a "Systems Engineer" and a "DevOps Engineer" - both are expected to produce HA, Automated, Well Documented Infrastructure, to allow developers to run their code. Anyone not doing that is just a _bad_ "Systems Engineer" Developers don't call themselves "Agile Developers" because they started…
> both are expected to produce HA, Automated, Well Documented Infrastructure, to allow developers to run their code
Wait have I been using the wrong definition? I thought DevOps were devs that also setup/maintain their own infrastructure
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#48Everywhere you see the word "devops" replace it with the word "empathy".
That was the true meaning of DevOps - fostering empathy and communication between different groups, and to stop the siloed "throw code over the wall to Ops" mentality that existed.
By having a "DevOp's Engineer" you have admitted you have failed at DevOps, because you have created a new silo.
A good team will have a combination of Operations Engineers, Software Engineers, Automation Engineers and Test Engineers all of whom work together, and collaborate on tooling, processes and deployments, who also share in the rewards for a projects success, and share in the responsibility for when something goes wrong.
DevOps is not a team created to "provide DevOps services to R&D" - which is the basic job description for far to many DevOps jobs postings.
It is also not just handy R&D pagers, and expecting them to manage a system.
Of course all of this is talking about the initial spirit of DevOps, not the current "Buy my Book", consultant driven mess that is now associated with the word.
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your disagreement. There's nothing we do under the umbrella of "DevOps" that wasn't part of competent service ownership twenty years ago. I read your article and the point that stood out for me was the notion that the skills to drive tools like chef, puppet are somehow new and different. But I know better, because although I use those tools today, back in the day we used cfengine and a bunch of declar…
As a relatively old guy, I always thought that DevOps was just the new name for what people have always been doing. It is literally just now that I've realised that other people think it is different :-) Possibly younger people don't understand what system administrators used to do...
"Possibly younger people don't understand what system administrators used to do..."
System Administrators used to blame developers. Developers used to blame System Administrators. Devops is in part an attempt to mediate between "silos".
Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role
#50Having worked on over 100 DevOps initiatives, I'm inclined to disagree. 8 years into DevOps, automation, cloud computing etc, it's time to accept that DevOps is a specialism and a function that companies - especially big ones - need to put into place in order to adopt the principles. See here for further thoughts - https://devops.com/im-happy-devops-engineer-job-title/
Because DevOps also include things like Agile, Lean, MVP, avoiding local optimisation, minimizing the amount of work in progress, and many other things.
DevOps is not just about infrastructure, you need buy in and a change of mindset (compared to waterfall) from the Devs, QAs, PMs and even sales / upper management.
This is really a company-wide change aka culture. So unless you are the one putting all of this in place, "DevOps engineer" doesn't really make sense. Automation engineer is what most "DevOps engineer" really are: automating as much as possible everything that touches the infra.