I love the dentist example. Imagine if dentists were treated like developers. It'd be hilarious!
How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
111–120 of 219 posts
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#112As someone who has been doing DevOps for 20 years, since long before it was called "DevOps"...
First, DevOps has degenerated into a meaningless buzzword to rival "Agile", despite the good ideas and good intentions. Every day, I have recruiters looking for "DevOps". A couple of years ago, they'd never heard the word.
Second, DevOps is actually getting strongly biased toward Ops, often to the exclusion of Dev. In the eyes of recruiters and much of the industry, it's become synonymous with "Chef/Puppet/Ansible automation", a set of automation tools. That's stupid.
Third, and this is what matters to me... DevOps is (or was meant to be/should be) more about organizational structure than skills. As the author points out here, specialization is good and necessary. But specialization comes with bureaucratic compartmentalization that makes working across org boundaries very difficult. When you have to climb four or five (or more) layers up the org chart to find common management for both the dev and ops sides of a project, then the dev team has no authority over and very little way to communicate with ops, and vice versa. For most large organizations, the dev/ops separation is necessary - developers get locked out of production systems to keep them from legal exposure to customer data (HIPAA, PII, etc), and to keep them from accidentally or intentionally altering production in a way that it might break.
Read Gene Kim's excellent quasi-fiction book, The Phoenix Project. It covers a lot of the issues of DevOps as fixing communication patterns in large organizations. You'll see how little of it is about tooling or "full-stack", and how much is about clearing bureaucratic obstacles to effective communication.
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#113DevOps isn't amount making Developers be Ops guys. It's about the fact that automation eats everything, and a significant part of 'ops' is now coding. A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It's someone who does only Ops, but through Development. It's not about start ups vs Enterprise, it's about 1 person writing programs or 5 people doing things by hand.
Saying "DevOps person" is like saying "Agile person". I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding. DevOps is about getting development and operations to communicate directly and work cooperatively, without impediments beyond inherent complexity.
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not the only variant of DevOps. There are companies where the developers are responsible for creating the automation scripts to deploy their code into production as services and expected to keep in running in production.
I'm inclined to think they're 'doing it wrong', especially when you cross in to the "keep it running in production" territory.
If your production deployments are fundamentally different than your dev deployments, you're doing it wrong. For the most part, you should only be localizing a common deployment pattern.
I've suffered through enough three week deployment cycles because the prod environment is almost nothing like dev and everything is done manually. I think I know what "doing it wrong" looks like there.
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#115The description of DevOps from the article describes what I do at a large multinational software company really well. In our project we have 5-7 developers who test each others code and functionality and one DevOps who does build/test environment, databases, release management, change management, impact analysis with regression testing, and fixes bugs, but rarely develops new features. It's being done not because of the startup culture, which we do not have. It's done for efficiency. Every request to the DB team, even minor, will take at least three days to process. We do not have so much time to waste, so we have to do everything ourselves, unless it's something that requires an actual expert in the particular topic to accomplish.
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#116DevOps isn't amount making Developers be Ops guys. It's about the fact that automation eats everything, and a significant part of 'ops' is now coding. A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It's someone who does only Ops, but through Development. It's not about start ups vs Enterprise, it's about 1 person writing programs or 5 people doing things by hand.
The OP has a point, but his choice of DevOps as the bugbear is clumsy. Maybe the bastardization of it by the business is what he's mad about. "Full stack" is, perhaps, a better target. It's a completely meaningless, useless phrase. The problem is that employers demand specialists, especially for senior positions. At the same time, once they've acquired an employee, they refuse to respect specialties from that point o…
I think a lot of people in this thread have never actually worked on a Really Big Project. Once you have two or three offshore teams, a hundred developers, associated support staff, multiple product teams, competing customer voices, multiple production environments in different locations with different support, "standards" imposed from external orgs that make no sense for the project at hand...
That's when DevOps gets really helpful and valuable. But if you haven't worked in environments like that, you have no idea what it's like.
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#117I don't really think a good developer can replace a good sysadmin. The reverse is true too, this is not a flamebait! :P I don't see "DevOps" as a way to replace some roles - but as a way to make everyone work better together. Instead of living each in their own bubble (and in my - pretty limited I admit - experience it always) everyone has to know, at least a little, what someone else does. It really helps everyone a…
I don't think that's completely true. A good developer must have a good knowledge of the stack he's working on. So he should be capable of managing that stack, shall the necessity arise. However, it's obviously better to separate matters and offload management/administration tasks to a separate team/person. Thus, a good developer in a good company (which has a separate sysadmin roles) indeed can't really replace good…
You're saying "good developer". What if not all your developers are good? Remember, someone is employing the bottom half of the bell curve, and making money with them.
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#118DevOps isn't amount making Developers be Ops guys. It's about the fact that automation eats everything, and a significant part of 'ops' is now coding. A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It's someone who does only Ops, but through Development. It's not about start ups vs Enterprise, it's about 1 person writing programs or 5 people doing things by hand.
Actually finally created a Hacker News account to come here and say something similar to this. The article is remarkably misguided in several ways, including a fundamental misunderstanding of what "DevOps" means.
Being an SA, what rankles me most is the attitude (unfortunately common in the industry) that "As a developer, I could naturally be the world's greatest Sysadmin, if only it weren't such a waste of my amazing talents."
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#119"All too common a question now, can you imagine interviewing a chef and asking him what portion of the day he actually devotes to cooking?" Yes. Chefs also do shopping, menu planning, prep, hiring, firing, marketing, and schmoozing with patrons. Source: I know a chef.
Exactly. You have to ask whether you're talking about a senior executive ("Chef de Cuisine", "Head Chef", "Executive Chef"), a subject matter expert or mid-level professional ("Saucier", "Pastry Chef", "Line Cook"), a junior person ("Prep Chef"), or a low man on the totem pole ("Busboy", "Dishwasher"). "Chef" is a very vague term when applied to large restaurants. Obviously, in a little family owned place, a lot of t…
We could replace the chefs with puppets...
Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer
#120DevOps isn't amount making Developers be Ops guys. It's about the fact that automation eats everything, and a significant part of 'ops' is now coding. A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It's someone who does only Ops, but through Development. It's not about start ups vs Enterprise, it's about 1 person writing programs or 5 people doing things by hand.
At least in my world view this is a much better definition of DevOps. Folks who make the world run, and through automation can keep a larger portion of the world spinning. It requires someone who can analyze failures, figure out how to predict and mitigate them, and then code automation to do so. Oddly this is much more like the 'developers' of old. If you sat down at a workstation you needed to know how to be your o…
When Flickr did their DevOps talk in 2009, most of the infrastructure engineers I worked with at the time saw the trend in reverse. The people wearing the Developer hat were relying on our team's ability to automate anything, so the Ops team ended up being the team that best understood how the whole system worked.
In 2009, DevOps seemed like there was finally a reasonable answer to Taylorism. Engineers and Programmers and Hardware Technicians and Support Representatives were not cogs in a machine, but humans that could collaborate outside of rigid boundaries. Even at the lowest levels of the support organization, individual workers along the chain could now design their own tiny factories.
From there, it's just a matter of communicating tolerances properly up and down the chain. I am probably over-romanticising these notions, but it certainly felt exciting at the time. Not at all like the "fire your IT department" worldview it turned into.