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How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

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Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#191

Post by sokoloff »

beat wrote: post #117
drdaeman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a lot of cases, they're making money despite them, not because of them.

I suspect in most mid and large sized companies that the top 10% of developers are creating more value than the next 50%, and that below that, the value could easily be negative.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#192

Post by dllthomas »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #190
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?

Of course it is, and there are collections of letters that are pronounceable words, but it doesn't give them meaning. The equivalent in English would be a spell checker that didn't flag "douberness" and passed it along. Sure you can pronounce if if you look at it phonetically but it doesn't mean anything. It is syntactically correct but broken. VHDL has a lot of things that can be written but not actually expressed i…

Sure, I've no doubt it's more common there - that's very much my understanding. The wording of the above just struck me very much as if it were meant to be hypothetical, which I found amusing given that it's nothing like.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#193

Post by georgebarnett »

In the same way that being able to cook dinner doesn't make me a chef, while it's true that a developer can be a sysadmin, QA or DBA, they won't do a very good job.

To suggest otherwise shows a complete lack of understanding of the nuance of those roles.

As for suggesting that "DevOps" is killing the developer - the only thing "DevOps" is doing is polluting our common language with a term that doesn't actually mean anything concrete. It's perfect consultant speak.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#194

Post by jimmaswell »

erkkie wrote: post #50
jimmaswell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope I'm not actually expected to know what any of those is.

If you're a developer and want to stay relevant I suggest you read up. With distributed systems becoming the norm rather than the exception, developers will need to understand how and where their code runs in production (and how it gets there) to be able to debug issues or write better behaving code.

are you saying the average developer is going to have to work with distributed systems in the near future (few years)?

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#195

Post by cothomps »

mrweasel wrote: post #8
chronid wrote: post #2

I 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…

It really helpful to have developers know at least a little systems administration, and vice versa. When doing web development at least there's a fair number of problems that you should just let a web server, caching server, database server or even the operation system handle for you. If developers no nothing about systems administration they sometimes solve non-problems. I'm just a guilty as anyone else in try to wr…

... this is right on. I've seen my own role in "DevOps" as being one that is less task-oriented and more toward bridging skill sets. The drive toward specialization (mentioned by the author) is leading us toward having "Ops" administrators that are completely incapable of understanding how an object-oriented system is constructed and "Devs" who seem almost oblivious to how computers (web servers, middleware containers, databases, etc.) actually work.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#196

Post by ldar15 »

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.

From 2009: http://www.rajiv.com/blog/2009/03/17/technology-department/

From 2010: http://dev2ops.org/2010/02/what-is-devops/

DevOps is not a department. Its certainly not someone who "only does Ops but through development".

Yes, there will be a lot of Ops guys automating things. Yes there will be a lot of "developers" doing deployments (using automation). But please don't start labeling people DevOps.

You no more have a DevOps department than you have an Agile department. Its a methodology, not a group.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#197

Post by amorphid »

pnathan wrote: post #27

This article is pretty ignorant. I don't think most developers have the capability to be sysadmins or QA. Vice versa, too, quite often. Joe developer ain't that special. Devops is about taking moving the infrastructure into its own configuration-managed artifact, taking lessons from programming and computer science, and coming out with its own engineering rigor. If you want your devs to operate builds/infrastructure/…

Developing systems, programs, and quality assurance all are all fairly different skill sets. A gross, possibly inaccurate simplification could be:

- systems is about thinking how different things fit together

- development is about building something

- quality assurance is about figuring out how to blow something something up

The thing is, I know technical people that I wouldn't trust to do one of the above, let alone all three at once. And I know people who can rock it in multiple disciplines. When it all comes down to it, focusing on the quality of the people you work with and helping them thrive is a solid plan.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#198

Post by erkkie »

jimmaswell wrote: post #194
erkkie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a developer and want to stay relevant I suggest you read up. With distributed systems becoming the norm rather than the exception, developers will need to understand how and where their code runs in production (and how it gets there) to be able to debug issues or write better behaving code.

are you saying the average developer is going to have to work with distributed systems in the near future (few years)?

I would say there's a strong tendency towards that, depending on how one exactly defines 'average' and 'distributed'. Using a distributed datastore and/or a messaging queue in ones app is pretty common already, logical next step is for app components to follow the trend.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#199

Post by dvanduzer »

dllthomas wrote: post #183
dvanduzer wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's piling on you because that wasn't the point of the example. Automation grants humans extraordinary powers, as long as humans aren't simply steps within the automatic system. There's been an awkward growing phase of the technology industry that has led to technicians that don't have any real understanding of the systems they maintain. Compare and contrast Robert DeNiro's character in Brazil with the repairm…

... what?

If you haven't seen Brazil, you can safely ignore that part of the post. But you should see it.
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