Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DevOps is a culture, not a role

dev.jlelse.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 139 posts

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#111

Post by CaptSpify »

skywhopper wrote: post #58

First, let me say I totally agree with the premise here--that all parts of a software engineering organization need to be on board with DevOps, buying in to the vision, learning the full stack, taking responsibility. However, this article does serve as a good example of one of the big problems with most DevOps/SRE evangelism: It's usually coming from the Dev- perspective, rather than the -Ops perspective (or better,…

A company I worked for started a devops team. 3 years later and there's still not a single ops person on it. There were so many security holes in their group we had to ban them from releasing to our servers, so now they have their own cloud setup that is bleeding money.

The frustrating thing is: I'd have loved to work closer with them. But every time we tried, the response was "You have no place here, your slowing the process down". We just wanted to automate the security testing, they decided that throwing the security tests out altogether was a better idea. I do admit that it was indeed faster....

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#112

Post by matt_wulfeck »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #86
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #82

Here's a thought: skilled devops engineers are indistinguishable from skilled software engineers, and vice versa. Who can be specialized anymore? Isn't devops just the compression of skill sets that we've been witnessing for the last two decades? As a developer, you now must be able to deploy, to write and maintain unit tests, and possess the knowledge to debug code deep on the system and network layer, and write cod…

Data scientists would disagree. Specialization is alive and well.

Only until their libraries become advanced and commoditized. Then they become indistinguishable from other software engineers.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#113

Post by jnevelson »

Here's my point of view as someone who's title currently is "Senior DevOps Engineer", and used to be a software engineer for many years:

DevOps has multiple meanings - in some (usually smaller) companies it can be thought of as a philosophy in that all developers are responsible for managing production infrastructure and their deployments. As a company scales, and the codebase grows, people have to start specializing. It's just not feasible for everyone to have perfectly overlapping skillsets and be completely replaceable by each other. It happens with frontend/backend, and it happens with "DevOps". I focus on our production infrastructure, making sure deployments are smooth, our database has backups, etc. That doesn't mean that other developers are completely detached from our production environment - if there's an issue in production multiple parties are involved in working through it and fixing.

I personally interchange the title DevOps Engineer with Site Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Ops/SysOps Engineer, etc. Different companies have different titles, but I'd wager that the majority of those positions tend to perform work of a similar nature. Depending on the size of the company, some may specialize even more (i.e. a large company may have SRE to focus on production/monitoring, and someone else to focus on deployments). It definitely varies company to company, but by and large I think it can all be grouped under "software operations", which itself is a subset of software engineering.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#114

Post by cestith »

cat199 wrote: post #79
richardjennings wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Possibly younger people don't understand what system administrators used to do..." System Administrators used to blame developers. Developers used to blame System Administrators. Devops is in part an attempt to mediate between "silos".

Bad System Administrators used to blame developers. Bad Developers used to blame System Administrators. Real Systems Administrators attempt to mediate between "silos". therego...

Therefore we need a new title to distinguish "Real System Administrators" from server technicians. So, we get "devops" for people who understand both.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#115

Post by dpeck »

matwood wrote: post #84
dpeck wrote: post #45

Related, I've found that the term devops is too poisoned to be used effectively when hiring. It brings out charlatans in far greater numbers than anything else at the moment. Garden variety technician level folks who self inflate their titles and roles to try to jump from 60k to 100k overnight. It's been frustrating as they're able to get things syntactically correct for the most part that they get through early phon…

Devops is less about knowing the syntax of something like Terraform and more about understanding, communicating, and implementing 'devops' best practices across an organization. The early phone screen should be an easy place to weed out people. I do agree that devops is the hot new title so people are jumping on it to try and make more money.

I mean syntax of the conversation. They're basically gaming the initial phone screenings and making us waste engineer time discovering that they don't really know anything. It's not exactly easy to get good filtering for this with first level screening but it's what we've had to do

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#116

Post by slackingoff2017 »

praneshp wrote: post #99
slackingoff2017 wrote: post #97

Devops just means your IT people are software engineers. That's it. Web systems are so complex (and automated) to manage these days that you need to be able to write code to manage the infastructure. Google has been doing this for ages without calling it Devops. As far as I'm aware all of their main support people are software devs

> Google has been doing this for ages without calling it Devops Are you of the opinion that DevOps, like Agile, is a buzzword and money making opportunity? I had a brief stint in a DevOps-ish role and that was my conclusion.

100% from the two companies I've seen implementing it.

All it means in practice is "fuck, our IT guys don't understand this docker thing. We need a software guy to write up stuff to automate all this"

I looked at a couple Devops position and saw the same. Basically "we need a software engineer with networking skills".

IT jobs are quickly vanishing. All the stuff that doesn't require software development has been automated away besides things anyone can do like wire some machines to a switch.

Everything is either really easy or quite hard and it's hard to hire a guy that knows software at an IT salary. Now we have Devops, so that execs can justify hiring software engineers to maintain the network.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#117

Post by FLUX-YOU »

sanderjd wrote: post #68
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, "Cultural Engineer" as a title has some pretty scary implications. So the DevOps Engineer is becoming a cultural engineer of the company with a better name. Which of course is title inflation and title overloading. Now if they'd just overload the salaries, we'd be set.

I've seen this a few times in the thread and I don't get it. Nobody is saying there is a "Cultural Engineer" role, they are saying that there are operations roles and development roles, and that DevOps is not a role, but a culture where the people in both roles understand, help, and cooperate with each other.

A devops engineer should know how to apply devops to your organization before the other roles have become proficient. It's someone to ask vs. reading the Internet for things that might not apply to you.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#118

Post by lowbloodsugar »

CaptSpify wrote: post #111
skywhopper wrote: post #58

First, let me say I totally agree with the premise here--that all parts of a software engineering organization need to be on board with DevOps, buying in to the vision, learning the full stack, taking responsibility. However, this article does serve as a good example of one of the big problems with most DevOps/SRE evangelism: It's usually coming from the Dev- perspective, rather than the -Ops perspective (or better,…

A company I worked for started a devops team. 3 years later and there's still not a single ops person on it. There were so many security holes in their group we had to ban them from releasing to our servers, so now they have their own cloud setup that is bleeding money. The frustrating thing is: I'd have loved to work closer with them. But every time we tried, the response was "You have no place here, your slowing th…

Just because someone has an Ops title doesn't mean they know anything about security. I've worked places where the Ops team caused every security incident.

Its a business leadership issue. When teams accept requests from the business and prioritize those requests over security then we have problems. Ops teams can be just as guilty of this as any other team.

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#119

Post by user15672 »

cestith wrote: post #114
cat199 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad System Administrators used to blame developers. Bad Developers used to blame System Administrators. Real Systems Administrators attempt to mediate between "silos". therego...

Therefore we need a new title to distinguish "Real System Administrators" from server technicians. So, we get "devops" for people who understand both.

Except in reality we get people who are bad at dev and bad at ops pretending they can do both

Re: DevOps is a culture, not a role

#120

Post by kmicklas »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #86
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #82

Here's a thought: skilled devops engineers are indistinguishable from skilled software engineers, and vice versa. Who can be specialized anymore? Isn't devops just the compression of skill sets that we've been witnessing for the last two decades? As a developer, you now must be able to deploy, to write and maintain unit tests, and possess the knowledge to debug code deep on the system and network layer, and write cod…

Data scientists would disagree. Specialization is alive and well.

I think think most skilled developers could easily do data science work, they are just more expensive to hire than data scientists.
Post reply on HN