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How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

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Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#151

Post by dsr_ »

zenbowman wrote: post #121
forgottenpass wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was (Unix) ops ever not coding? I honestly don't know, I haven't been around that long. But all the old guys I know were "perl is unix duct tape" ops guys. The older, more foundational problems were getting automated back then. Now that they're solved problems, and combined with more and more people running large and/or virtual infrastructure, a new problem domain exists around spinning up machines and deployment. Th…

Yeah, I was never aware of a sysadmin who couldn't code. Generally, a sysadmin has slightly different skills from a developer - they might code in a highly imperative style and always keeping the actual machine/system being targeted in mind, but I've never known a half-decent sysadmin who cannot write code.

The last time I looked for a senior sysadmin -- less than a year ago -- I didn't get anyone who was comfortable programming in Perl/Python/Ruby until I started using the term DevOps.

If that's the term the market wants to use, fine. As far as I'm concerned, a senior sysadmin who can't write in a couple of scripting languages isn't senior.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#152

Post by dasil003 »

michaelochurch wrote: post #83
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.

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…

"Full stack" is useless in the same way that "Agile" is useless. Specifically, it's useless because it was hopelessly cargo-culted and overused due to the original power of the idea.

The genesis of full-stack developer is that in the early days of the web you had a long history of programmers, and you had a budding community of web designers and javascript developers homesteading the new medium. For many years, there was an awkward gap in skills in that a good programmer would probably not be able to build a decent HTML/CSS website, and a good DHTML developer or web designer would be completely lost on the server-side.

5-10 years ago a full-stack developer was a very meaningful distinction. Today, every hacker wannabe Uber driver that went to a dev bootcamp for 3 months calls themselves a full-stack developer. "DevOps" avoids this fate only because the subject matter is slightly heavier and harder to fake.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#153

Post by coolsunglasses »

dllthomas wrote: post #123
ChuckMcM wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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?

Nah, in dependently typed functional programming languages you can prevent this at compile-time.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#154

Post by cracell »

The author needs to read or reread The Mythical Man Month. Even in a large organization there are important benefits to having fewer people on a team. Even if this means that someone is sometimes doing work that they are overqualified for.

He makes some good points but he misses the value of needing fewer people to accomplish the same thing.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#155

Post by dllthomas »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #153
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?

Nah, in dependently typed functional programming languages you can prevent this at compile-time.

Yes, "every language" was glib. In any language we could avoid it, actually, by hiding division behind something that gave a Maybe or Option or similar. My point, though, was that his "Imagine..." was actually representative of virtually all of the languages that virtually all of us work in virtually all of the time. It is therefore a poor example of a way in which HW is different.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#156

Post by jsmthrowaway »

eric_cc wrote: post #32
rb2k_ wrote: post #11

I think the idea is not necessarily to have developers run production systems, but they still should know what production looks like and at least have basic knowledge on how to configure all of the moving parts of the system. Having developers be 'full stack' imho reduces the amount of "works on my machine". How would a developer test the software he/she is developing on if she can't at least get close to a productio…

It's more like wanting to be a painter without knowing how paint brushes are created. Ideally I don't need to know how a system is configured (to an extent, of course), I just write the code.

That, right there, is the attitude that leads to unmaintainable software. If you want the position of general contractor, then you'd better know how to interface with zoning authorities, draw architecture, and perform maintenance on your creation over time, or at least work very closely with the people who do know and do care about that stuff. You are not above any of those things. Ever.

All too often I see feature developers say "well, I have an operations team, I'll let them figure it out," and they (a) never leverage said operations team for advice during development, (b) don't consider operational concerns such as sharding, deployment, logging, and monitoring at all during development, (c) file a ticket against operations with three weeks to go until their deadline to perform all of those things, and (d) call for rolling operational heads when their service does not perform to their expectations (using the author's "totem pole" as their rationale). As an operations engineer, I can count way too many fucking times I've been on the other end of that from developers with attitudes like yours. It is the absolute worst part of my job.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#157

Post by dredmorbius »

nickstinemates wrote: post #150
dredmorbius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the guy who's usually on pager rotation (and too often with far too bodies to share it), I disagree. I wrote a detailed comment a few days ago explaining my rational here, in conjunction with overtime / off-the-clock responsibilities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7575875 • It increases pager coverage, and reduces any one person's pager obligations. Simply having pager anticipation is a mental burden after…

I'm glad you have had a positive experience, but, it feels like your outlooks is unique among many of the developers I talk to daily. Could be selection bias, though! Good things to think about.

To be clear: I'm generally on the ops/systems side, not engineering / development.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#158

Post by erkkie »

Shizka wrote: post #129
erkkie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for voicing this so well, this has been my experience as well and it's probably safe to say our systems will continue to evolve to be more complex as our tools which enable us to deal with the complexities co-evolve. Having a full picture of things will stay a requirement.

But there is a difference between "having a full picture of things" and actually painting the picture yourself. Here I mean that to have a general overview of the different parts of the system is beneficial for everyone involved. However when you need to set up and interact with all components of the system on a daily basis it becomes a very time consuming task.

Absolutely, managing that balance is tricky and requires all participants to communicate to bridge the gap. Call it whatever.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#159

Post by rythie »

I think there is a lot miss understanding here, to me DevOps is not just automation (we've had that for a long time, Perl, cron, cfengine etc).

It's much about applying the same processes you would apply in development to Ops. For example committing changes into version control and only using that, not live patching things, much like you wouldn't live edit a website.

Also being able to spin up new servers based on a config and not requiring manual config to get it going. Automation alone does not get rid of 'snowflake servers' http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html

Also, it can be about letting developers get the exact same environment for development/testing at no additional time cost - which in turn makes it more like that code changes can go live without problems or delays.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#160

Post by kingraoul3 »

stiff wrote: post #34

You can't really draw a hard line between administration and development, in the end you are just building a system and the more you know about it from all angles the better design decisions you can make and the easier it is to fix issues. I diagnosed a few problems over the years that arose as apparent issues with a web application but that I gradually narrowed down to things like network issues, or kernel bugs, or…

I don't know - I need to know the kernel, the shell, the hardware, networking, programming, all of the services that are in prod and automation tools and how to manage a code base. Now I need to learn how to write production quality code in Node?

I'm all for a tighter integration between Ops and Devs, and infrastructure-as-code can help bridge that gap, but I don't know that doing each others jobs is the solution.

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