What I Do as a DevOps Consultant

Though there's also the other side of the coin, people picking up a tech because they read about it, which ends up in the core business, without good rationale for the tech other than "i found it on the internet".

This blog post really reflected my background, with most of the tech used being the same. However, most of the experience is by cleaning stuff up. I see stuff being used too many times that are not performant, effective or incorrectly configured due to people not taking care of said tech. Especially in the Javascript business. It is cleaning up tech debt that might not make cash in the short term, but many companies have it as a burden in one way of another and someone willingly to clean that mess up is very valueable, imho.

A nontrivial part of my career has been smacking people with sticks when they do this, so yeah, I agree with you here. I don't view that as the other side of any coin, however--rather, it's the same thing, where there is a lack of a holistic understanding of what goes into any given piece of technology and what the (inescapable) knock-on effects of it are.

Cleaning up the results is sometimes due to a soberly considered "we have to move fast now to not die" decision, but often is just because it looked good in a five-minute demo.

That's quite arbitrary and you likely defined it as this to fit your current business or occupation. Or even just your current main competencies.

I could say a real-full-stack should actually include EE, chip design, compiler design, kernel hacking, model checking, machine learning, virtual reality, power supply design, and 20 years of experience in Rust.

Or anything, really.

Great DevOps practitioners are rarer than 10x engineers. It's the combination of:

* Systems knowledge through the lens of Conway's Law: what does an ideal even look like in terms of organizational efficiency

* Leadership to get disparate teams in an organization to cooperate instead of compete

* Technical competency to help disparate teams adopt the principles, because telling people on the fence to "go Google it" is a plan for failure

People who get bogged down in CI/CD/IaC/containerization miss the forest for the trees and it's why most organizations never see any value out of their DevOps initiatives. If you don't know what to automate then WIP increases your costs. If you don't have leadership on board then you can't reorganize teams to prevent "cycles" and re-work inside the "factory". If you don't have technical competency then you have people re-inventing the wheel, poorly.

You need all three.

I'm a freelance DevOps consultant working in Germany

I consider my duty as 50% as consultant regarding DevOps culture and agile culture and to 50% "building pipelines and all that automation stuff" This shows quite clearly how DevOps as a term is used in Germany. Either the fusion of responsibility of Dev and Ops is meant or just someone who does this modern cloudy stuff One thing I really like in the DevOps space is that I never had a problem with the tech stack at a customer. Some want more cloud, some more pipelines, some more infrastructure, still I could do every project and never had problems with my qualification. So when I have calls from recruite I kinda skip the tech stuff, since it won't be the issue anyway. I'm more intersted in how much the company really does DevOps and Agile. I just recently declined a job opportunity bc the company wanted to buy this modern DevOps stuff but actually couldn't risk an actual change.

The customer I currently working for is a mess. It's a middle sized company who has to finish 3 projects at the same time and do neither the "new world" nor the "old world" They overthrown a lot of the old world rules and took a lot of power from the project managers. But what they are doing now is taking random parts of the new world and implement it in a broken way and say "we are modern!" Like this they are doing neither of it and they end up with basically just chaos. Companies often want a change without having a change. And for me it's kinda annoying to run against corporate walls, when I was hired (as an expensive external!) to solve those problems but then getting ignored. So they throw more people at the problem and just churn them. As you guys already know, what 1 guy in IT can do within 1 day, 2 guys can do it in 2 days.

P.S.: I'm planning to relocate from germany to NY. If someone needs a DevOps, give me a shoutout to: jjdjnrjfifj@gmail.com Also open for non-work contacts. Don't want to be alone in NY