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DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

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Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I think DevOps is like religion As long as no-one is knocking on my door asking if I have five minutes to discuss Agile development methodologies. I could reasonably defend most of what people attach to the "DevOps" buzzword as sane practices most of us were already doing before the hoopla. Agile (with a capital A) is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. Kill off that…

I once worked at a place full of Agile cultists, including a bunch of "certified" "coaches." They spent about 1/4th of the time in planning meetings, retros, grooming sessions, sending emails about updating percentage complete on jira tickets, etc. They made some of the dumbest technical decisions I have ever seen, were perpetually rewriting things, changing core APIs, breaking other parts of the system. The stuff ba…

Heh centralized teams to request something as simple as a branch to commit code... or to deploy a feature, and not at scale or anything, where “services” are a simple CRUD API with like 4 people who are customers.

Bloated IT organizations. Reminds me of working in the energy industry. Made up jobs, unmotivated workers, and incompetent management including the CTO. C level exec magazines says to literally eat shit? Here, let’s eat warm turds everyone.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#112
post #7

Sidebar: does anyone else get the feeling that infrastructure as code is just cloud vendor lock-in by another name? Especially since the output of the code ends up being wild unstructured JSON/YAML files with no spec or discernible schema. My favorite is how in the Microsoft toolchain you can build a CI pipeline in a visual UI on the right that automatically updates the YAML file on the left. “We know you don’t want…

No, the skills of your people are the lock-in.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#113
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious, what is it that you don’t like about Agile? I mean, the concept, the processes? The lack of something or too much of something?

Not the parent, but I agree fully with their point - agile is good; but there is a difference between "agile" and "Agile". Especially in the enterprise world, agile has been overran by worthless certifications and so-called "Agile" consultants/experts, who broadly fall into 1 of 2 groups: project managers looking to cash in, and technically inept "senior developers" looking to cash in by turning consultant. Every one…

Appreciate you explaining this point further, I didn’t realise there was a difference between ‘agile’ vs ‘Agile’ and the only other methodology I had heard of was waterfall which also seems to be universally disliked.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#114
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience ops call the developers when something breaks overnight in any case.

In our organisation, developers have need nor clearance to access live customer data. This means they stay out of production and we have to deal with breakage. Usually I can just revert to an earlier version and file a bug report, sometimes I have to cherry pick. Having developers "fix" things in production under time-stress at 3am without proper code review sounds like extremely poor practice.

So you have some one every shift who is familiar with every part of a complex system and the requisite programming languages.

And reverting part way through a monthy telco billing run might not be the best idea.

And in my case they also looked after online services and other systems.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#115
DevOps didn't exist... fella, let me tell you something, when I started, color screens were not the norm and you kept your homemade double-sided 5 1/4" floppy disks ( thank-you paper hole-punch ) in a plastic flip-top container with the contents written on the label in black sharpie.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet peeve with agile is it is so rigid at most places. Our team had a bug a while back. We all failed to understand something until it was getting QA'd. We told the PO that we'd need at least part of a sprint to fix it and asked if we could get that prioritized in the next sprint. You would have thought we'd asked to kill someone. We wasted a couple hours debating why it couldn't be finished in this the last day o…

This is literally the opposite of the agile manifesto and the original intent and the origins from Lean manufacturing. Take a look at original agile folks who discuss this extensively on twitter. Look at John Cutler's incredible blog posts: https://medium.com/@johnpcutler

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Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#117
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but I agree fully with their point - agile is good; but there is a difference between "agile" and "Agile". Especially in the enterprise world, agile has been overran by worthless certifications and so-called "Agile" consultants/experts, who broadly fall into 1 of 2 groups: project managers looking to cash in, and technically inept "senior developers" looking to cash in by turning consultant. Every one…

Appreciate you explaining this point further, I didn’t realise there was a difference between ‘agile’ vs ‘Agile’ and the only other methodology I had heard of was waterfall which also seems to be universally disliked.

You should read the original waterfall paper as it is basically agile in spirit: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~csci201/lectures/Lecture11/royce1970...

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#119

Personally I think DevOps is like religion. It means whatever someone wants it to mean. Some companies think DevOps means having an automated pipeline for building, testing, and shipping code. Other companies think it means micro-services. Others think it means making developers do DBA / SysAdmin work. All of these things are fine for companies to do. How you run your org is on you. But I wish companies would go deep…

> Personally I think DevOps is like religion As long as no-one is knocking on my door asking if I have five minutes to discuss Agile development methodologies. I could reasonably defend most of what people attach to the "DevOps" buzzword as sane practices most of us were already doing before the hoopla. Agile (with a capital A) is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. Kill off that…

The "Agile" most people complain about is the same thing we had before "Agile" came. You've got 2 broad camps: people who really want to do adhoc development and would like an industry accepted word to call doing whatever-the-heck-I-feel-like. The other side are the people who, having risen to a position of influence are desperately trying to add value, even though they don't actually do anything that results in code being written.

In the former camp, the people tend to like "Agile" because of the doctrine of writing code over doing planning. Often you will find PGMs/PMs who will write a story like "Make the site awesome!" with no other details. They usually want an estimate of how long that's going to take, but will refuse to add any more details -- because that's over-complicating the issue. They really just want to take credit for anything good that happened and punish people for anything bad that happened, all while doing absolutely no work. Usually they are actually deluded enough to think that their role is vital.

In the latter camp, usually there is a feeling that the programmers are stupid and this is why everything is in a complete mess. In order to fix things, they want to take control over everything and throw things over the wall at the programmers. Often the people in these camps used to be programmers (or may still think of themselves as programmers) and have always thought, "If only I could make everyone do what I want, then I can fix all the problems". So they spend their days dictating what everyone will do. It gets even more fun when similar people band together to form elite troops of specifiers -- that's where you get the endless meetings.

We've had this since programming in groups began. This is nothing to do with Agile. It wasn't any better at all before Agile. After Agile was introduced, nothing changed at all except now these guys have another name to incorrectly describe what they are doing.

My biggest problem with Agile is that it says nothing at all about how to accomplish the stated goals. That's why it is so attractive to people who don't have a useful methodology for producing software.

Do I want to continuously deliver software? Tick. Do I welcome changes to requirements? Tick. Do I want to deliver software frequently? Tick. Do I want business people working with software developers? Tick. Do I want motivated developers? Tick. Do I want to have face-to-face conversations? Tick. Do I want working software? Tick. Do I want to sustain a constant pace indefinitely? Tick. Do I want excellent software and design? Tick. Do I want simplicity? Tick. Do I want self organising teams (as long as "self" means myself)? Tick. Do I want the team to tune itself to get better? Tick.

Wow! I'm Agile! Whoo hoo! How do I accomplish the above? To quote someone I worked with in a previous job: "Most of this stuff is common sense. We're all the best in the industry and so this should be second nature to us. If anyone can't do these things then they really don't belong on this team". Now that's a strategy!

Mark my words: within the next 10 years there will be a new word for people to rally behind. At first it will make sense and some people will do cool things. But then the people who want to do nothing and the people who want to force others to do their bidding will grab the word and crush any meaning it ever had.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience of that which has been called 'agile' is that it's an excuse by programmers not to do the boring stuff, so they can got straight into the coding. Not to plan, or even think too much, definitely not to document (sometimes not write anything down at all ), often not to test except in a token form and sometimes not even that. Is that agile? That's how 'agile' has been done where I work anyway. Maybe I've b…

Yes, I understand. While I’ve never only attributed that to Agile alone, but also this sort of brogrammer-code-is-the-real-product, it sometimes feels like a maturing industry sort of rolled back into its teenage years. Diagrams? Solution models (up front thinking)? Document for future reference? Nah, we don’t want to do that. It’s sad. Just recently had an experience like this with developers I manage. I do loathe t…

A significant chunk of software is a dead simple one off and does not need much in the way of design or maintenance. At the other end you have software that risks human lives and or billions in damages.

Picking the right process for where each project fits on that continuum is surprisingly difficult. Cowboy coding can be anything from a horrific idea to the most efficient setup, unfortunately people are rarely flexible enough to know the difference.

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