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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#221

Post by bgro »

dijit wrote: post #17

I’ve long held this opinion but I consistently get drowned out. DevOps has different meaning depending on who you’re talking to, even some definitions that appear similar are different in nuanced but important ways. All “devops” as a job title has done has muddy responsibilities and given many folks the wrong impression of what an operations discipline should be. There is also a lot of rewriting of history that gets…

I don't understand how seemingly 90% of developers, can't do anything outside of their narrow scope of experience. Writing a shell script? Throw a temper tantrum, that's devops job! Have to work with legacy code? I can't believe this!

Especially seniors and beyond. They force leetcode interviews they somehow pass or are grandfathered through and gatekeep "trash devs" by slamming gotchas about how the whiteboarded code discussion doesn't technically compile and how "returnAverage()" isn't a method ("did you know you have to write methods before they work? What does returnAverage() supposedly even do? Return a random character in the alphabet?")

I get excited about working in different tech areas. I'm exceptional at fixing other's bugs and maintaining code. Absolutely nobody seems to be hiring for this though. It's all about college exam trivia and leetcode.

When I do get into these companies, I have to work with people throwing around casual racism with HR joining in and f-slurs like it's corporate 4chan. I ask if anyone can help look at a critical bug I discovered, and nobody speaks up. Even when it turns out it was their last code change that caused it and they are the sole master expert in this area, and they were just working on organizing their desktop instead.

"I can try to look at the SQL problem, since nobody else spoke up." Then I'm explaining the basics of SQL to some guy sitting around blank faced and it turns out he was hired because of his 10+ years of expertise in SQL. His whole job is to tackle problems like that.

Meanwhile I'm out here looking for jobs when panic cuts happen and it takes forever because I'm drained from all the gotchas and gatekeeping in these interviews.

There's no way I could live with myself if I put this experience onto others. I lose sleep when I fail to call out someone talking over a quiet person on my team. I've never seen anybody else stand up for anybody, however.

Re: DevOps is broken

#222

Post by at_a_remove »

At this one place of employment, I had been struggling to divest myself of system administration duties for some time. I can do them, but I don't particularly like them. I have a few things I'm good at in that area (troubleshooting, being paranoid), but I really despise middle of the night calls, early morning patching, and so on. I had finally gotten to a good place.

And then someone newly promoted decided to rewrite everyone's job titles and I was suddenly DevOps, sucked back in.

Re: DevOps is broken

#223

Post by dilyevsky »

Multicomp wrote: post #180
dilyevsky wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race car driver vs bus driver. Race car driver knows how their car functions and works with engineers/mechanics on improvements. Bus driver don’t give a shit (no offense to bus driver). Decide which company you are - a race team or a bus line

I will extend this analogy to say I am a race car mechanic but I'm having to pick up how the driver drives the car in order to make the car perform better, with the eventual goal of being able to drive the car myself (ops -> devops -> dev) so I can do any of the above roles. Software devs who close their mind to the lower parts of the stack give me the opportunity to learn and do their jobs as well, becoming a more v…

> becoming a more valuable employee as a result.

That’s iyho. The management of a bus line company doesn’t see it that way ;)

Re: DevOps is broken

#224

Post by calvinmorrison »

Izmaki wrote: post #81
calvinmorrison wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps to me is all about bridging what used to be a huge gap between operations and development. Developers need to know top 10 OWASP. One cannot simply say "it works locally". Ops people need to understand how your tools and programs work at a high level at minimum.

These two talks will change your view on DevOps forever: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwSNjVTF168 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyvgFDh-kw

not if I don't watch it.

Re: DevOps is broken

#225

Post by francisofascii »

counttheforks wrote: post #4

> The problem is most engineers don’t want to do operations work. There's your problem. You have people who build stuff without caring where and how it runs. Recipe for disaster.

Previously we had better division of labor IMHO. 1) UX people (Photoshop, CSS) who made the front-end look nice, 2) Developers (JavaScript, C#, Ruby, Java) who wrote application code and business logic, 3) DBAs who controlled the database, and 4) Sys Admins (Unix, Windows Server) who deployed the built code and ensured it ran correctly and securely in production. Now some of us seem to think this should all be the same discipline, and if you don't care to, you are a bad engineer.

Re: DevOps is broken

#226

Post by williamcotton »

sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #133
williamcotton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what about Google Sheets? Lots of people are able to build things in Google Sheets without knowing where and how it runs. Perhaps most of our organizations are using the wrong tools and that the way we divide responsibilities is the problem. Imagine if: 1.) instead of general purpose languages being used by product developers we had domain-specific languages and tooling that were agnostic to things like deployme…

That's an interesting idea. I wonder what constraints led us to the current division of labor, and which ones are artificial.

I have no idea!

I’m currently working on a small team of computer engineers who support a custom Turing-complete DSL for an “operations” team that both programs and directly interfaces with clients.

It doesn’t seem that different from what Apple or Microsoft do, which is write custom languages and tools for developing on their platforms, albeit specifically for general purpose programming.

Re: DevOps is broken

#227

Post by apalumbi »

bgro wrote: post #221
dijit wrote: post #17

I’ve long held this opinion but I consistently get drowned out. DevOps has different meaning depending on who you’re talking to, even some definitions that appear similar are different in nuanced but important ways. All “devops” as a job title has done has muddy responsibilities and given many folks the wrong impression of what an operations discipline should be. There is also a lot of rewriting of history that gets…

I don't understand how seemingly 90% of developers, can't do anything outside of their narrow scope of experience. Writing a shell script? Throw a temper tantrum, that's devops job! Have to work with legacy code? I can't believe this! Especially seniors and beyond. They force leetcode interviews they somehow pass or are grandfathered through and gatekeep "trash devs" by slamming gotchas about how the whiteboarded cod…

I like to build up my teams with people that act and think like you. Sometimes I need a sniper and when I do I'll get one. But my teams need to be excited about building and running the systems that we make.

Re: DevOps is broken

#228

Post by hinkley »

kennend3 wrote: post #156
NikolaNovak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>the only alternative is to start making CPUs by hand Agreed. For some applications the cloud difference is significant; for many (most?) others though, "Cloud" is just rebrand of "Hosted". And even for more cloudy offerings, while I'm in a very specific and different part of IBM, some of the old timers/architects/powers-that-be keep trying to explain "We had that in 1969 !!!" :-D Agreed also at rewriting of history…

> My dad has been IT director and he chuckles when I talk to him about "new and exciting paradigms" which he of course sees as turning a circle to what they had in 70's and 80's :) As someone with 20+ years in IT, I agree - a lot of these "new and exciting paradigms" are not new at all. My personal favourite is how many large multi-nationals are now building in-house clouds? WTF is the difference between an "in-house…

The only possible value over the last iteration is if they cleaned house and the new team manages to be more permissive than the old one. I'd much rather have on-prem, but the sad fact is that for cloud I just need a signed check. For on-prem I also need buy-in from other divisions before I can even start experimenting with a new service.

I still have the exact same problem with respect to never having exactly the ratio of CPU to memory that would make my app happy.

Re: DevOps is broken

#229

Post by hinkley »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #193
kennend3 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My dad has been IT director and he chuckles when I talk to him about "new and exciting paradigms" which he of course sees as turning a circle to what they had in 70's and 80's :) As someone with 20+ years in IT, I agree - a lot of these "new and exciting paradigms" are not new at all. My personal favourite is how many large multi-nationals are now building in-house clouds? WTF is the difference between an "in-house…

> WTF is the difference between an "in-house cloud" and a shared-use datacenter from the 1990's? Can't call a mainframe a bunch of buzzwords like "Hyper-converged, high availability, on-premise software as a service cloud platform".

Turn-key cloud technology.

Re: DevOps is broken

#230

Post by adamsb6 »

kennend3 wrote: post #156
NikolaNovak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>the only alternative is to start making CPUs by hand Agreed. For some applications the cloud difference is significant; for many (most?) others though, "Cloud" is just rebrand of "Hosted". And even for more cloudy offerings, while I'm in a very specific and different part of IBM, some of the old timers/architects/powers-that-be keep trying to explain "We had that in 1969 !!!" :-D Agreed also at rewriting of history…

> My dad has been IT director and he chuckles when I talk to him about "new and exciting paradigms" which he of course sees as turning a circle to what they had in 70's and 80's :) As someone with 20+ years in IT, I agree - a lot of these "new and exciting paradigms" are not new at all. My personal favourite is how many large multi-nationals are now building in-house clouds? WTF is the difference between an "in-house…

I think the difference is the interface.

The interface to the shared-use datacenter, if you're lucky, is a spreadsheet that declares the static resources you own and a remote hands guy that can tackle things beyond the capabilities of your remote KVM. If you need more capacity you need to work with the datacenter folks to order physical machines that might show up in a few months.

The interface to the in-house cloud is an API. In most instances, developers are completely abstracted away from the physical infrastructure and don't need to take a lock on some human in the datacenter to get their work done.

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