Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

> For me DevOps/DevSecOps is reaction movement against toxic turf wars and silos of functions from ambitious people

Well the DevOps grandfathers (sorry, Patrick & Kris, but you're both grey now) certainly wanted to tear down the walls that had been put up between Devs & Ops. Merging Dev & Ops practices has been a fundamentally good change. Many tasks that used to be dedicated Ops/Infra work are now so automated that a Dev can do them as part of their daily work (e.g. spinning up a test environment or deploying to production). This has been, in a sense, about empowerement.

The current "platform engineering"-buzz builds on top of that.

> - not some business people scheme to reduce headcount and push more responsibilities

I imagine that many business people don't understand tech work well enough to deliberately start such schemes. Reducing toil could probably result in lower headcount (no one likes being part of a silo that does the same manual things over and over again just to deploy to production), but by the same count the automations don't come free. They have to be set up and maintained. Once one piece of drudgery has been automated, something else will rear its ugly head. Automating the heck out of boring shit is not only more rewarding work, it's also a force multiplier for a team. I hope business people see those benefits and aim for them, instead of the aforementioned scheming.

> Think of your "DevSecOps" people doing 3x the work they should. Do you know what else are they doing? Booking their own business travels. Reconciling and reporting their own expenses. Reporting their own hours, broken down by business categories. Managing their own vacation days. Managing their own meetings. Creating presentations on their own, with graphics they made on their own. Possibly even doing 80% of work on lining up purchases from third parties. And a bunch of other stuff like that.

It feels like you are working at the same company as me.

Companies complain all the time about how difficult it is to find competent developers, which is their excuse for keeping most of the teams understaffed. Okay, then how about increasing the developers' productivity by letting them focus on, you know, development?

Why does the paperwork I need to do after visiting a dentist during the lunch break take more time than the visit itself? It's not enough just to bring the receipt to HR; I need to scan the paper, print the scan, get it signed by a manager, start a new process in a web application, ask the manager to also sign it in the web application, etc. I need to check my notes every time I am doing it, because the web application asks me a lot of information that in theory it should already know, and the attached scan needs to have a properly formatted file name, and I need to figure out the name of the person I should forward this process to, rather than the application figuring it out itself. Why??? The business travels were even worse, luckily my current company doesn't do those frequently.

My work is defined by Jira tickets that mostly contain a short description like "implement XY for Z", and it's my job to figure out wtf is "Z", who is the person in our company responsible for "Z", what exactly they meant by "XY", where is any specification, when is the deadline, who am I supposed to coordinate with, and who will test my work. I miss the good old days when we had some kind of task description and the definition of done, but those were the days when we had multiple developers in a team, and now it's mostly just me.

I get invitations to meetings that do not concern me or any of my projects, but it's my job to figure that out, not the job of the person who sent the invitations. Don't get me started on e-mails, because my inbox only became manageable after I wrote dozen rules that put various junk in the spam folder. No, I don't need a notification every time someone in the company made an edit on any Confluence page. No, I don't need notifications about people committing code to projects I am not working on. The remaining notifications often come in triplicate, because first I get a message in Teams, then an e-mail saying that I got a message in Teams, and finally a Windows notification saying that I got a new e-mail. When I return from a vacation, I spend my first day or two just sorting out the flood in my e-mails.

On some days, it is lunchtime before I had an opportunity to write my first line of code. So it's the combination of being Agile-Full-Stack-Dev-Sec-Ops-Cloud-Whatever and the fact that everything around me seems designed to make my work harder that is killing me. This is a system that slows down 10x developers to 1x developers, and us lesser mortals to mere 0.1x developers.

> trying to seem smart/clever

Nobody that uses bit flags do it because they think it makes them look clever. If anything they believe it looks like using the most basic of tools.

> One should not have to worry about solar flares!

Do you legitimately believe that a bool is immune to this? Yeah, I get this a joke, but it's one told from a conceit.

This whole post comes off as condescending to cover up a failure to understand something basic.

I get it, someone called you out on it at some point in your life and you have decided to strike back, but come on... do you really think you benefit from this display?

Neither do I, but those answers later become outdated anyway. :D

In a startup you get significantly more focus time than in a large company. Especially if there is no production yet - there are no clients, no production bugs, no-call.

In a larger company, literally 80% of your job is meetings, Slack, and distractions.