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How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

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Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#131

Post by keypusher »

Aqueous wrote: post #128
NickPollard wrote: post #18

DevOps 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.

Right - and I guess the point is that the person who is working on features ends up also being that one person who does the automatic provisioning and testing pipeline administration work, as well. This is honestly why I've gone with PaaS - mostly Heroku - for several months now when deploying a new application. Why on Earth developers do anything other than working on the core features of their program I don't know.…

Try convincing the ops at a large bank, insurance company or government that they can run their infrastructure in the public cloud, and watch as you get laughed out of the building.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#132

Post by mark_l_watson »

+1 I don't agree, but an interesting article anyways.

I have worked with DBAs who had PhDs and could have still done development, but they moved past that to concentrate on schema development, scaling, etc. Toss into the mix modern programs of master data development inside organizations and people who are characterized as DBAs have a very sophisticated role.

Also, for small projects, devops makes all the sense in the world to me. Deeply understanding how an entire system works is valuable.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#133

Post by Aqueous »

keypusher wrote: post #131
Aqueous wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - and I guess the point is that the person who is working on features ends up also being that one person who does the automatic provisioning and testing pipeline administration work, as well. This is honestly why I've gone with PaaS - mostly Heroku - for several months now when deploying a new application. Why on Earth developers do anything other than working on the core features of their program I don't know.…

Try convincing the ops at a large bank, insurance company or government that they can run their infrastructure in the public cloud, and watch as you get laughed out of the building.

Two, three years ago you'd be right. Rightly or wrongly more and more people are thinking differently about that. The CIA for instance.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#134

Post by jiggy2011 »

Aqueous wrote: post #128
NickPollard wrote: post #18

DevOps 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.

Right - and I guess the point is that the person who is working on features ends up also being that one person who does the automatic provisioning and testing pipeline administration work, as well. This is honestly why I've gone with PaaS - mostly Heroku - for several months now when deploying a new application. Why on Earth developers do anything other than working on the core features of their program I don't know.…

If you're working on a startup that is not yet profitable (or at least compensating you for your time), your time is currently worth close to nothing. That same time may or may not have a higher value later.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#135

Post by kokey »

area51org wrote: post #99
gaius wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the devops movement is silly. In the 90s when I started, every SA knew, and used, Perl and C in their daily jobs. Then dotcom happened and every kid with a Linux box in their bedroom put themselves about as a SA. And in the 10s people think SAs who code is an amazing new invention. And back in the 60s, IBM had "systems programmers"... Same thing.

It wasn't really that clear-cut. I started in Ops in the '90s, too, in SV, and there were plenty of SAs I knew who were proud of the fact that they weren't coders. Yes, they knew the shell, and maybe they knew a tiny bit of Perl. But as a guy who was an SA and a coder (Perl, C) I was a rarity. I still am, but the "DevOps Movement" is here to point out that this artificial dichotomy is considered harmful.

Back in the early to mid 90s most Unix sysadmins I knew started out as computer science students, so they could code (the most practical language being C) but ended up coding less over time.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#136

Post by Aqueous »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #134
Aqueous wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - and I guess the point is that the person who is working on features ends up also being that one person who does the automatic provisioning and testing pipeline administration work, as well. This is honestly why I've gone with PaaS - mostly Heroku - for several months now when deploying a new application. Why on Earth developers do anything other than working on the core features of their program I don't know.…

If you're working on a startup that is not yet profitable (or at least compensating you for your time), your time is currently worth close to nothing. That same time may or may not have a higher value later .

Your time is priceless to a startup - it can't afford to pay you your value and yet entirely depends on your output. The startup literally can't exist without you.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#137

Post by kokey »

gaius wrote: post #90
maratd wrote: post #3

The market is maturing. Take a look at a market that is similarly structured. Look at construction. You have general contractors and then you have subs that work under them. A general contractor is a jack of all trades, master of none. Exactly what a full stack developer is. This isn't the end of specialization. It's the beginning of project management steered by developers who intimately understand all of the work i…

The joke is that what web guys call "full stack" is actually a small niche of software development.

Yup, the article also leaves out networking, where developers 'who can do the job of others' are usually the most blatantly incapable of not being able to do just that.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#138

Post by yesdocs »

NickPollard wrote: post #18

DevOps 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.

I can't imagine an environment, other than say a juggernaut company (Google, Amazon, RackSpace, etc) that would require a full-time DevOps engineer. Most companies are delivering a simple service with modest needs. The reality is in these small environments is that their world is fairly small. These small environments rarely go over 50 machines and but a handful of services … so how many times can you automate something? How many new DevOps tasks can be created daily? How many different patterns can a DevOps engineer come across? I’ve done all of these and I quite frankly don’t see a great challenge in this field.

In the old days, it was an Architect/Team Lead/Sr Developer who figured out how to distribute a product, then the maintenance and upkeep of the installation scripts was later handed to developers of “less” capabilities. But the architect still reviewed and was keep abreast of installation changes. An Architect/Team Lead/Sr Developer should setup the intial design, scripts etc for use as “DevOps”, but DevOps is not a new engineering discipline. The DevOps tools are trivial to understand (kinda like InstallShield’s VB scripts) and easy to master. However, it does require an engineering discipline. Kids that are used to pushing buttons in NetOps can’t suddenly become an experienced coder … they know little of classical software development.

I disagree with the author implying that you should hire a DevOps engineer to do this work so that coders can “code”. The economies of scale are way off, this is something a that a junior developer masters so that he can spend more time coding. I wouldn't recommend companies spend so much on an employee performing a task that is trivial at best.

No, this task is a Developer’s job, and as a Developer, you better know about them. I won’t argue that mastering these tools are not time consuming, but if you want to master development, these tools had better be on your roadmap. Software Engineering is a new discipline, what we need to know increases over time and mastering this field is getting harder and harder … kinda like natural selection.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#139

Post by mlieberman85 »

I disagree with the central thesis of his argument that being generalized is a detriment and that operations and other factors should remain siloed at your average large company. I've worked at both large companies (10k+ employees) and small companies and many things in between.

In general a Full Stack DevOps oriented approach always tends to be more efficient. You have less monolithic hard to maintain applications because you force the teams to be small and agile. People will have their specialties (operations, backend, frontend, etc.) but still remain generalized enough to have an idea of the big picture. If your application has issues where the frontend developer doesn't know the general idea of how Varnish and Nginx in your stack are setup then perhaps your application is too big and complex.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#140

Post by dllthomas »

dvanduzer wrote: post #130
dllthomas wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Imagine a computer language where 1/0 was a legitimate statement, not caught by the compiler, but always blew up in your executable." ... isn't that all languages?

Whether it's detected at compile time or runtime, a statement that evaluates to DIVBYZERO can be handled. Taking the result as an ordinary value that blows up your program, on the other hand...

"All languages" was a bit tongue in cheek, but even in Haskell, (div 1 0) gives a run-time failure.
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