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

DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

circleci.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 176 posts

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

#131

Post by james_s_tayler »

icedchai wrote: post #99
headmelted wrote: post #73

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…

I've worked in several places that each had their own unique snowflake take on "Agile".

With Agile being constant, the experiences were wildly different between them.

The key variable to whether they were dysfunctional or not wasn't Agile. It was the quality of the people in management.

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

#132

Post by headmelted »

GordonS wrote: post #91
christopoulos wrote: post #81

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…

GordonS gets it.

This is true. Not long ago (about six months) a project I was working on was assigned a scrum-master (tip: You can just be the person saying "any blockers?" and "next". You don't need to be master of anything.)

Genuinely nice person, it's anecdotal, but just making it clear I'm not bashing them. Regardless, after a stand-up in the very first week they just volunteered that they had no technical background whatsoever, and couldn't write a line of code. They were at the same time actively making architecture decisions outside of the stand-ups and relaying this to the P/O.

It was a nightmare.

The above is right, Agile (with a capital A) has become little more than a way for non-technical people to have lucrative careers in software by destroying the otherwise promising careers of technical people in software.

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

#133

Post by james_s_tayler »

mikekchar wrote: post #119
headmelted wrote: post #73

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…

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…

Brutal. Accurately brutal.

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

#134

Post by xellisx »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #15

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…

> Others think it means making developers do DBA / SysAdmin work.

I've been in that spot many times. In my last job, I did engineering (networking, server, etc) / support for 7 data centers. We started to support of 3rd party "cloud" products, and then they dropped the DCs they gave me the title of DevOps Engineer IV. When they did that, I didn't have any Dev or Ops responsibilities.

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

#135

Post by james_s_tayler »

procinct wrote: post #113
GordonS wrote: 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.

"Agile" is just an instance of "agile" which is an abstract concept. Hence you can't actually do "agile". Therefore every form of agile you see is "Agile" and they're quote "doing agile wrong".

Read the manifesto. It literally says handful of almost completely meaningless, unimplementable things.

Any attempt to actually take that and turn it into something is destined to be sharply divorced from reality.

But the real fun comes when you do "white water rafting" style development. This is when there is all the ceremony of "Agile" (read: a "fast paced environment") with all the planning of waterfall and absolutely everything is top priority. You and your coworkers are constantly thrown around trying not to smash into rocks or capsize the boat, meanwhile being pulled violent in every direction. Somehow you continue to make your way down the river eventually with fewer and fewer co-workers as she casualties mount.

Fun times.

The actual methodology is completely irrelevant. Working under terrible management is terrible. Working under terrific management is terrific.

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

#136

Post by caymanjim »

viklove wrote: post #43
scarface74 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Devops "blue collar work"? Provisioning servers, databases, load balancers, etc and other resources use to involve someone driving down to the colo and installing hardware. Often now, it's a yaml file you run through Cloud Formation. Devops is just as much development and software engineering when you are working in a cloud environment -- it's an API call.

That's exactly the reason. Software engineering is about writing code, devops is about writing yaml files and keying into functionality that was implemented by software engineers.

You could say the same thing about software engineering. The vast majority of it is simply assembling components that already exist. I've worked on dozens if not hundreds of web apps, and most of it is just gluing stuff together. Often it's done on autopilot (or literally automated code generation). I've also worked on a lot of code that was original and challenging. Systems work is the same thing. Most of the time you're just assembling existing components, but the overall design of the system is absolutely engineering.

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

#137

Post by caymanjim »

DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it.

When I mention "systems administration" to younger coworkers, they look at me like I'm a crusty old relic out of touch with modern engineering. People have no sense of history and little understanding of where the devops role came from and what it really means. I had a CTO tell me he hadn't heard the term "system administration" in ten years.

What were our devops people doing? Running web servers, managing networks, configuring DNS, managing backups, configuring cloud services. Absolutely none of it in support of the dev team I was on. The developers were responsible for managing their own CI/CD pipeline and deployments. The people called the "DevOps Team" were responsible for managing production. In this case, they were systems administrators and were not in any way a devops team, but the terminology is so skewed now that they were labeled as such, and I was labeled an out of touch old greybeard.

This isn't to demean devops in any way; it's a valuable role, an evolutionary step in software team organization, but by no means is it new and by no means is systems administration a dead role.

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

#138

Post by strken »

caymanjim wrote: post #137

DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it. When I mention "systems administration" to younger cowor…

When I hear systems administration I assume it's pets not cattle, and that you're administering individual named servers with bash scripts rather than administering a mesos cluster with chef or puppet or whatever.

I'm not sure where I picked up this impression from.

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

#139

Post by sunaurus »

caymanjim wrote: post #137

DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it. When I mention "systems administration" to younger cowor…

I know that "DevOps" is one of those terms that can mean whatever the user wants it to mean (like "agile" and "REST" and so on), but at least with DevOps, I've mostly only seen 2 types of common definitions:

1) "DevOps teams" are just rebranded operations teams

2) "DevOps teams" are teams that are responsible for both development and operations for their app

I think the first one is the one you're frustrated with, and I agree it's a completely useless label when used like that, but it's not definitely not the only way it's used.

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

#140

Post by riccardomc »

viklove wrote: post #43
scarface74 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Devops "blue collar work"? Provisioning servers, databases, load balancers, etc and other resources use to involve someone driving down to the colo and installing hardware. Often now, it's a yaml file you run through Cloud Formation. Devops is just as much development and software engineering when you are working in a cloud environment -- it's an API call.

That's exactly the reason. Software engineering is about writing code, devops is about writing yaml files and keying into functionality that was implemented by software engineers.

Right, just like telescope building is about making lenses and hollow tubes, astronomy is about looking at the sky and keying into the functionality that was implemented by telescope makers.

I believe you would benefit from a different perspective because this vision is partial at best. The distinction between who builds system and tools and who uses them is subtle and often these roles are interchangeable. Both have dignity and purpose and contribute to the goal, regardless of the collar color, which is a remnant of the last century.

Galileo built his own telescopes.

Post reply on HN