How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer • Hacker News Board

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#71

Post by nulagrithom » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

aero142 wrote: post #61

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.

This is not the only variant of DevOps. There are companies where the developers are responsible for creating the automation scripts to deploy their code into production as services and expected to keep in running in production.

I'm inclined to think they're 'doing it wrong', especially when you cross in to the "keep it running in production" territory.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#72

Post by Fasebook » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #33

There is no content here. Why are people explaining themselves and upvoting this nonsense?

YCombinator is like a reverse link aggregation for businesses. Instead of readers coming to this site for information, people troll with their latest business bullshit and expect free solutions in the comments.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#73

Post by zalmoxes » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

forgottenpass wrote: post #67

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.

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…

It's about more than just "unix duct tape". It's about 'Infrastructure as Code', treating servers like programming objects. It's about using configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet instead of writing bash scripts which only work on one system.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#74

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #62

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…

> Having developers be 'full stack' imho reduces the amount of "works on my machine". Not necessarily, it can also be worsened . I think Conway's Law is especially appropriate here: "[O]rganizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." When everybody shares IT responsibilities "because they can", it leads to each of those…

[deleted]

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#75

Post by dominotw » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

As someone who is moving into more of a devops role from a pure development role. Here is my learning list so far.

1. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference. http://www.amazon.com/The-TCP-Guide-Comprehensive-Illustrate...

2. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Environment-Addison-Wesley...

3. A systems programming language- I choose golang.

4. GDB/makefiles

5. SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide http://www.amazon.com/SSH-Secure-Shell-Definitive-Guide-eboo...

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#76

Post by michaelochurch » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

It seems to me that the OP's real objection isn't to "DevOps" but with the reality of the software industry. He's upset that developers often are asked to do "lower" work. I find that a bit simplistic on his part. If anything, DevOps at its best is about elevating the ops work (by recognizing automation possibilities).

The issue is that employers are horribly inconsistent. They demand specialism in hiring, but refuse to respect specialties once they've pulled people in. Thus, you end up having to interview like a real computer scientist, only to find that most of the work is mind-numbing for a serious programmer, but that there's no one around at-level for it because "we only hire A players".

DevOps didn't do this. The problem is the industry, not one concept.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#77

Post by RRRA » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

Most coders I see would be useless as sysadmins...

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#78

Post by sev » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:12 PM UTC

I work at a large enterprise company and for a while I was part of the DevOps team as a software engineer.

Some of our goals included:

   - Building the continuous integration/delivery pipeline
   
   - Moving codebases from one source control system to another
 
   - Creating programs/systems to automate tagging of builds
   
   - Automating the deployment processes of multiple applications onto non-production servers
 
   - Implementing and maintaining the functional testing frameworks and server grids

The more I look at these goals, the more I realize that the developers who work on feature delivery should not worry about these anyway. So I disagree that DevOps is killing the developer. In fact, DevOps is helping the developers focus on what's important.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#79

Post by mncolinlee » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:12 PM UTC

I couldn't disagree more about his portrayal of DevOps. There are companies misusing any and all paradigms of development. Google "cowboy coding agile" to see what I mean.

When I think of DevOps, I don't think of having everyone know everything. Ops staff have to know enough code to write deployment automation scripts and dev staff need to know enough system administration to step up and help when the monitoring or deployment automation breaks.

It's meant to be a partnership to maintain a system rather than the old practice of throwing code over the wall. It really harms morale to have the developers all enjoying wonderful weekends while ops is on red alert because app changes they don't understand broke everything in production.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#80

Post by nnq » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 5:13 PM UTC

Are any other companies besides (well funded) startups actually hiring people as "full stack developers"? I mean, yeah, it's normal to look for candidates with full stack experience, but not to hire them in an actual job position that requires them to do full-stack work... it's a big difference.

(sorry if the q is off topic, I don't really understand what OP is ranting about with the devops problems, so I'm referring to the only part of the article that makes any sense to me, that about the full-stack devs...)