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DevOps is a culture, not a role

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Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#51

Post by allsunny »

jasode wrote: post #28

I was thinkging about that Mike Dilworth quote: "DevOps is a culture, not a role! The whole company needs to be doing DevOps for it to work." It's one of those kinds of statements that at first glance, looks really insightful and invites the head nodding up & down in agreement. However, thinking about it some more, that type of quote can be applied to anything . "Compliance is a culture not a role. Everyone from the…

I'll take your outrage comment has hyperbole, I've yet to see anyone that upset by it. Anyway, the frustration, I think, is it's just a new name applied to a role that always existed.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#53

Post by xorblurb »

mugsie wrote: post #48

Everywhere 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 Eng…

That's like Agile; the practices that emerged after the principles are sometimes (often?) WTF.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#54

Post by bogomipz »

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #14

"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…

Title inflation is generally something one does to one's own title though isn't it? Isn't it also done to "inflate" the perception of one's status to others. I don't believe that's whats going on with "DevOps Engineer" at all however. If anything its just an unfortunate misnomer.

DevOps Engineer is not being promulgated by the engineers themselves but by both recruiters and managers.

A quick search using "DevOps Engineer" on a job site like indded.com returns 196 matches. There is even "Senior DevOps Engineer" jobs listed.

The other contributor to the circulation of this as a title is companies that have a DevOps department and then by extension engineer in that Department become known to management as DevOps Engineers.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#55

Post by dkhenry »

I agree its a culture, but there is a role to be played, and in all the cases where I have moved teams down the DevOps path it has always started with specialists who can help the team out as they transition.

Then there is the operations part, no sane person would say since we do "DevOps" and "Continuous Delivery" now, so lets give ever member of the team full admin on AWS. Even in a _very_ mature organization you have snowflakes. If your DevOps team is doing its job, more and more of the workflow is being shifted all the time to the product teams and less and less is being owned by them. Then once they have delivery fully migrated, they move on to be your SRE's which is something I think most teams who have devops people will never get to.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#56

Post by DeerSpotter »

mugsie wrote: post #48

Everywhere 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 Eng…

hmmm doesnt seem right

That was the true meaning of Empathy - fostering empathy and communication between different groups, and to stop the siloed "throw code over the wall to empathy" mentality that existed.

By having a “Empathy’s Engineer" you have admitted you have failed at Empathy, 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. Empathy is not a team created to "provide Empathy services to R&D" - which is the basic job description for far too many Empathy 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 Empathy, not the current "Buy my Book", consultant driven mess that is now associated with the word.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#57

Post by Stranger43 »

A big part of the problem is that DevOps are not really about new technologies but just a new word the same bottom up management theory that also gave rise to buzzwords like LEAN.

In essence it's a shift from thinking in terms of grand strategic plans drawn up by the high management to be mindlessly implemented by the "replaceable" employees, to thinking in terms of reacting to problems as seen from the bottom of the org chart.

The problems with buy in is that DevOps kills a lot of the prestige difference between different teams/silo's as it's basically about realizing that the no developer or systems architect have enough knowledge about the "real world" problem they are trying to solve to design/write anything in isolation.

Or to put it differently DevOps means that the implementation and development teams owe operations a steak dinner if/when the system tumbles over and operations gets the dreaded 3am pager call, due to an untested edge case, not that the two roles merge into one.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#58

Post by skywhopper »

First, let me say I totally agree with the premise here--that all parts of a software engineering organization need to be on board with DevOps, buying in to the vision, learning the full stack, taking responsibility.

However, this article does serve as a good example of one of the big problems with most DevOps/SRE evangelism: It's usually coming from the Dev- perspective, rather than the -Ops perspective (or better, a balanced perspective). In particular, this focuses mostly on getting code to users, and speeding up that process. While that's certainly important, it leaves out any discussion of:

    * security
    * infrastructure design
    * instrumentation and monitoring
    * planning for failure
    * security
    * performance evaluation and tuning
    * disaster recovery planning
    * security
    * off-hours on-call responsibilities
    * security
Successful DevOps cultures must address these things just as much as they address code feedback loops, time-to-production, rollback strategies, code pipeline automation, etc.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#59

Post by dahart »

inopinatus wrote: post #6
benjaminwootton wrote: post #2

Having 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/

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…

You're talking about the difference between sysadmins of the 90s and devops of today. The comment you replied to was talking about the difference between product engineering and operations engineering -- he's defending the idea that devops is a specialization of engineering as a whole. It looks to me like you're right, and the comment you replied to is right, and you seem to be agreeing.

He's not saying that chef and puppet are different because they're new; he's saying that using chef and puppet and docker all day long is a different job than debugging CSS and JavaScript or implementing REST api in scala all day long.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#60

Post by psyc »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #2

Having 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/

Completely agree. None of the current top comments even mention what DevOps actually does. I can't understand where the motivation is coming from to obscure it into some fuzzy "human" wankery.
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