The Developer is Dead, Long Live the Developer

As in all things in life -- the truth is somewhere in the middle. If you build significantly sophisticated systems you will need specialists at some point. I don't recommend wasting their talents on getting reamed out for forgetting to configure the firewall properly.

We don't hand off code to be installed, we give a release plan, an installation plan, and the code. We are on call for first runs, and there's always a subject matter expert developer on call to support overnight issues if the support team needs help. If you have this responsibility, you write more responsible code. If I may support something overnight, I'm not going to unthoughtfully make it hard to support. We share testing and documentation responsibility as well (although documentation is an issue), so again testers and support are doing their job in a vacuum because they don't have the developer's insight to the program. In fact, devs do most of the testing. It's not always easy to write test cases for a system you didn't write or design. I've kind of always thought that it's common sense to support your own product in test/production as needed (though not the first point of contact). You wrote it, you're the expert.

Reading this article surprised me because I thought it was the same everywhere. Having no responsibility for testing or prod seems like asking for bad code. If you're just writing code, you're not going to focus on what it's going to be like to support it, install it, maintain it. You'll have other, more concrete (to you) things to focus on. Coding standards may become more important. But are standards really as effective if they're not informed by / don't care about responsibility for a production product?

Ideally, people should support their own work. If I build something and have complete ownership of it, I'll make sure it runs. If I'm the one who's getting the money and career progress, and I'm picking the deadlines, I'll be the "3:00 am guy". It seems fair that it should be that way.

On the other hand, if I'm asked to build someone else's idea, to their deadlines, making technical compromises that I wouldn't choose, then I'm not going to be the "3:00 am guy" for shots someone else called. Fuck that shit, life's too short. If you want that from me, either pay a consulting fee ($250+ per hour) or give me serious equity (like, founder levels). Otherwise, That's Not My Job.

Salary jobs are for the stability of pay and work (i.e. not being the 3:00am Guy) and for career advancement (resume, respected titles, networking). That's what I'm paying for when I accept a salary 1/10 of what I'm worth to the business. If I'm expected to take on extra duties that don't advance my career, and not getting that stability, then I'm not getting what I paid for.

I'll gladly take the negatives of ownership if I get to partake in the positives (autonomy, self-direction, participation in the reward) but expecting me to take only the first is just unreasonable.

So while people will probably dedicate 80% of a week to a given kind of task, they can, and do, play multiple roles, depending on how much their specific expertise is needed that week.

For instance, I am the number one choice on UIs, but I also play support managing Postgres, because I did a whole lot of that in a past life, and we don't need a full time DBA. I am also leveling up in our scheduling system, all Akka actors.

At my previous job, the team had all the Database experience it needed, but domain knowledge was weak, so I spent much of my work working with users trying to figure out what they needed, and why they were unhappy with the product. They hired me for my UI strength, but reality said that I would be more useful doing customer facing activities half the time, so I did.

I rely on the ops guys to keep vanilla installs steady and to keep everything patched, but there's very little way that they can get insight into application problems (especially in the framework du jour) that express themselves at some other location in the stack. I just have to know the whole thing.