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DevOps is broken

blog.massdriver.cloud

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Re: DevOps is broken

#311

Post by agumonkey »

rglover wrote: post #249
travisgriggs wrote: post #34

I have bewilderingly tried to discern why software development continues to grow more and more complex. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when we talked about languages and OSes and libraries as if they made a difference on how much you could get done with as little people and cognitive load as possible (the claims were very much overrated, but the point was we acted like it mattered). And then it started…

I like the Uncle Bob explanation: the number of developers has a doubling rate of ~5 years due to the constant entry of new developers [1]. Over time, the number of inexperienced developers far outweighs the experienced ones. Inexperienced developers naturally gravitate toward complexity because they don't know any better. Couple that with a social drift toward hyper-specialization. That sort of hierarchy naturally c…

society also changed, tech is trendy, ecobronerds have the wheeldrive

Re: DevOps is broken

#313

Post by guhidalg »

331c8c71 wrote: post #254
guhidalg wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always point people to the original paper that defined REST: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc...

Should one also point people to the original vision of OOP (by Alan Kay) when they mention the term?

Yes, at least when there's disagreement about what OOP means. You and I can disagree about it, but we can more easily answer "Does it match what Alan Kay wrote about?" with a yes or no.

Re: DevOps is broken

#314

Post by bob1029 »

dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #302
bob1029 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the business will never let you actually own it. This is not true in many startup environments. You'd have a hell of a time getting me to work on a new project without some sort of equity arrangement.

Does the equity come with voting rights? Can you fire the C-suite? Can you legally leave and fork the project? Without stuff like this it's hard not to see equity as simply a different way of getting paid.

> Does the equity come with voting rights?

It does in my case.

I started out as a junior developer. I am now in the C-suite.

Equity is also not a replacement for salary, which we clearly just take for granted these days.

Taking an adversarial stance in business is the fastest way to wind up nowhere. Being able to "fire the c-suite" is not a good thing. If you have to do that, you likely don't have a viable business in the first place.

Re: DevOps is broken

#315

Post by fleddr »

"From full stack engineering to DevOps practitioner, our industry loves to pretend everyone can do everything."

To me, this gets to the heart of the matter. As example, I present the required skillset for a front-end engineer:

https://frontendmasters.com/guides/front-end-handbook/2018/

See the index on the left. Do you need to know everything about all of these things for every single project? No. But as you grow into a senior, you'll be touching almost everything in that list.

It's an absolute explosion in complexity. Web development once was barely considered engineering, now it's one of the most complicated roles in the industry. Consider also that almost everything on that list is constantly evolving, this list being 4 years old.

Has all this added cognitive load and complexity resulted in massive productivity wins and dramatically better outcomes (UX, quality)? I'd say no, or at least it's questionable.

My point being is that this is already too much. I work in teams with a distribution like this: senior (20%), medior (50%), junior (30%). So the vast majority of them are median. And the median programmer is severely lacking against our ever growing demands. It's crude, but the typical programmer really sucks at programming.

So if next you're going to add even more to this pile with all sorts of devops and funky cloud tooling, the issue becomes clear: we're over-asking.

We over-value flexibility and scaling but ignore its dramatic costs.

"Devops" is just a made up word.

Re: DevOps is broken

#316

Post by dijit »

kodah wrote: post #305
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 get called an "Infrastructure Engineer" sometimes, I've also had the title of SRE and SWE. I don't really feel like any of these actually fit me. I do work on Cloud Infrastructure at times, but honestly it's the smallest part of what I do. It's usually addressed in the architectural designs and I have to touch it incrementally. What I do much more often is writing tools, daemons, and services for distributed system…

In the games industry we have a role called “tools programmer” which is a person who works on tooling to accelerate development, sometimes these can be extensions to the editor for a specialisation for a game (say, a tyre builder for a racing game) and sometimes they can be more broad (a distribution tool using libtorrent so that a new build of the game can be shipped worldwide very quickly).

There are people who might refer to you as a backend programmer (if the focus is services and daemons), or platform engineer (if the focus is developer velocity).

Largely it depends what your primary focus is.

Re: DevOps is broken

#317

Post by tootie »

shadowgovt wrote: post #56

This echoes the philosophy of Google Site Reliability Engineering, which (this is key) is an engineering discipline. The job of DevOps is not to close tickets. That'd be like driving a car by shouting directions at someone lying on the floorboards holding a wrench to the steering pinion. The job of DevOps is to build a steering wheel (and ideally, teach SWEs how to drive... at least enough that they understand what a…

Well they explicitly use the term SRE and not DevOps and I think that's very intentional and related the gist of the article. DevOps was never meant to be a role played by a person or a team. It's meant to reflect aligned incentives of dev and ops. Whether you have an SRE team or a platform team or a bunch of kitchen sink teams.

Re: DevOps is broken

#318

Post by tootie »

A lot of this rings very true but I think it's missing the actual nobel intent of DevOps that is still true even if it's been hopelessly corrupted. He touches on a lot of the counter examples that lead to the rise of DevOps. Things like ops/admin teams making themselves a gatekeeper or bottleneck to delivery. That's a classic problem in traditional IT departments. Dev is incentived to ship features, Ops are incentived to avoid downtime. The two goals conflict. DevOps says we all work together to ship features that don't cause downtime. That's a philosophical aim and not a new discipline. The maturity and sophistication of the tools and practitioners is orthogonal. If you hire a team and set them apart from Dev and give them an incentive to avoid downtime and call them DevOps then you've accomplished nothing. If you hire SREs or platform engineers or whatever else you call them and align their incentives to dev and dev to them then congratulations.

Re: DevOps is broken

#319

Post by Smaug123 »

hbarka wrote: post #25
makestuff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is like your doctor being the anesthesiologist, the recovery room nurse, and the surgeon all at once.

Bad analogy. How about your mom asking you to help wash the dishes and take out the garbage?

That is an extremely bad analogy. The purpose of chores is to spread the load onto an otherwise unproductive member of the household. (And to teach said household member how to do them.)

Unless you're arguing that engineers are unproductive members of a company, I suppose.

Re: DevOps is broken

#320

Post by boppo1 »

jahewson wrote: post #138
travisgriggs wrote: post #34

I have bewilderingly tried to discern why software development continues to grow more and more complex. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when we talked about languages and OSes and libraries as if they made a difference on how much you could get done with as little people and cognitive load as possible (the claims were very much overrated, but the point was we acted like it mattered). And then it started…

I semi-agree but my take is that money can buy you people, it can buy you lines of code, more moving parts, more stuff. But it can’t buy elegance, efficiency and good design - those have to be nurtured. Most engineers nowadays haven’t ever seen a codebase that isn’t a hot mess (no offence folks). The demand for talented and experienced engineers eclipses the available supply. The industry is growing too fast for that…

Any open source codebases that meet your approval?
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