Ask HN: DevOps Engineers, What Do You Do at Work?

I specifically go for things that seem guarded. Stuff people do that seems to be job security. Exists 'only' to keep them employed.

Not with any animosity, mind you. There are usually tendrils to that kind of stuff. It's usually important work but perhaps the specifics need updating.

For instance: while "Bob" does the same he always does, there may be a group of new people wondering why it existed this way. He may just need help getting out from under it.

Perhaps the work can be saved instead of repeated, the new folks can take it on, or they obsolete it entirely. Processes are funny like that.

This spills into meetings a lot. Convincing people to do the obviously good thing, defending reason, etc. It's not just writing Ansible/Python (our tools of choice) as much as I'd prefer that.

Overall the goal is to be a force multiplier without rustling too many feathers

I don't start actual work until everyone involved is aware/agrees - lest my actions be for naught. Maybe I'm missing important context. Checking in, amicably, is important.

We can do this stuff in the shadows, that's fine. I just want the day to be better for everyone.

The second (and personally more important) thing I do is try to remove as much friction from the dev's experience as possible. I go and chat with the devs, find out what parts annoy them, where they get stuck, and what level of control they want to have. Then I go away and try and resolve those issues.

For me, DevOps is more about Dev than Ops. I started as a dev, and nothing kills productivity for me more than waiting for the pipeline, not being able to find where logs are being sent, not being able to get access to the Kube cluster and so on. So I do what I can to make the devs happy, happy devs generally equals better outcomes.