2023 DevOps Is Terrible

I would love this to be the case, but it seems that complex and expensive systems are too lucrative to everyone involved: CTOs get to manage big budgets and bit teams, devops people get paid large salaries to justify the CTOs salary and large service budgets, etc.

This sounds like a tale of woe. but. The fault is the culture, not the people doing the grunt work. Like devs, if you're used to nails, then you'll want to use a hammer for everything.

> gives you expertise in application design/architecture.

a sysadmin should know much better how your application runs in real life, and more importantly, how it behaves when it goes to shit.

They _should_ know more about all the different types of services (ie kafka vs NATS etc) because they will have had to set way more of them up than a typical dev. If thats not the case, you've had bad or poorly mentored juniors running your stuff.

The reason they should know, is because they have the pager to make it work at 4am.

Look, if I had it my way, and I was at a medium sized company, I would buy in 3 mainframes, in three disparate locations, set the lock step replication to "very yes" and make sure each dev used the local DB and use the job description lang, to define scale.

Pay the $1million a year to outsource reliability of DB and state. Because frankly most people can't program for either scale, redundancy or recoverability. (yes that includes k8s) let the hardware do all of that and save a bunch on staffing costs.

I work at a HUGE scale place, and yes there is a need for special sauce there. but even then not that much, and not enough to justify the massive churn in systems. Most PE is just cargo culting busy work. Stick to ECS and PSQL and just get on with making actual buisness features.

For a given level of complexity in an organisation, talk to any 10 experts on the subject in the organisation (ie how does the foobar process work) and you will find blind men describing an elephant. All technically correct but all missing important parts

The paradoxes

At some point an organisation acquired or grew an antogonistic part. Both cannot really exist but both have not been removed. Think either Google search vs Google ad sales (if you return perfect search terms each time, you get less page views hence less ad impressions. Make search worse get more ads served). Or simply other non core businesses. Pretty much every non-tech mega corp is really dozens and dozens of smaller businesses with a shared treasury so they can ride out each others ups and downs. But one or two businesses are really carrying oat of the load.

Anyway, you can find paradoxes or conflicts of interest in all businesses and badly aligned incentives hurt everyone.

Someone should fix that. Not me I don't have the power (indeed usually only the orignal centralmfounder has power to)

Safe spaces

Yeah these don't exist. If you ain't upbeat publically you are seen as trying to pull everyone else under. So how are problems acknowledged let alone fixed? Dunno.

What would really help would be free speech, open conversations and discussions based on data that can inform policy and provide impetus to chnage. we (kinda) have this in western journalism / media (including social media). But absolutely no large corporation anywhere has a open discussion area where different factions can raise their concerns. there are of course political infighting amoungst the powerful elites of the corporation but that's not the same thing - they might even be accurate about the problems but no one else knows.

Democracy matters

Sorry this was supposed to be about devops - and it kinda is. Most large corps have some devops thing going on where "this time we will fix it all for everyone" - but has there been open conversations with data supporting it from all parts of the org? oh come on.