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How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

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Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#81

Post by giulianob »

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.

"A DevOps person isn't someone who develops, and who does Ops. It's someone who does only Ops, but through Development."

That's not true. There are many scenarios where devs also understand ops and do both. It's getting rid of the "throw it over the wall" mentality and incorporating ops within dev itself IMO. And devs love to automate things so we have created a lot of tools for that.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#82

Post by LinuxDevOps »

dominotw wrote: post #75

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 golan…

If you like the Stevens, his TCP/IP Illustrated is kind of a 'bible'.

Also, not sure what you're getting into but usually for sysadmin for scripting you need to know one of: Bash|python|Perl|Ruby

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#83

Post by michaelochurch »

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 on. Machine learning expert? Sorry, but we need a ScrumDrone over at desk 21-B. Being a software engineer means resolving the fight between your job and your career, which is probably a big part of why this industry is so political.

Employers are remarkably inconsistent in this regard. They want sharp people who can interview like real computer scientists, but get in the way of their continuing sharpness (by assigning smart people to dumb work) as soon as they're on board.

The insight that the OP has is that employers over-hire for crappy work, and he's completely right, but DevOps didn't do it.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#84

Post by gaius »

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…

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.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#85

Post by lawncheer »

DevOps, at least imo, is not about technology. It is about culture, and applying practices to speed up the various loops across organizational groups (marketing, sales, developers, ops). Of course there will always be trade-offs, if you don't have the budget to hire both an expert in the technologies that, say for example, speed up configuration management, and prevent snowflake servers AND someone to develop the code for the product, the person you do hire, will have to either pull double duty, or the org will have to plan for the fact that it is probably going to be doing "stuff" slower.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#88

Post by mellery451 »

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.

well, in many places DevOps is implemented as "developers on PagerDuty". When I (the developer) have to be on-call for 7 day rotations, phone by bedside, paged at all hours, then I'm most definitely acting as operations - probably NOT what I signed up for.

And, contrary to the stated intentions, I've directly observed developers making crappy, band-aid fixes to ongoing production problems in the interest of "making the pages stop". This is the mindset when you are on call be being paged at all hours.

In theory, DevOps is supposed to put those that can best fix things closest to the problems, but in reality a slight separation from the firestorm of ops actually produces better, more thoughtful solutions in the long run.

The best balance is to have a first tier Ops on-call, 2nd tier engineering on-call, and any alerting issues get attention within 24 hours, moving to the front of the work-queue. But, indiscriminately assigning everyone "pager-duty" rotations leads to lower quality solutions in the end.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#89

Post by phamilton »

I personally think DevOps is terribly misunderstood. I think the best way to describe DevOps to that it broke down the traditional Ops/QA/Developer roles into different roles, namely SRE, Platform Engineer, and Developer.

Developers take on the new responsibilities of being able to independently deploy their code, instrument and monitor stability and own test/QA.

Platform Engineering is about building a robust infrastructure and the tooling needed for Developers to handle the new responsibilities. This includes packaging, monitoring, deployment, AB testing, etc.

Site Reliability Engineering is about dealing with fires outside of the codebase. Hardware failures, network connectivity issues, etc.

I don't think any of these roles becomes a "Jack of all trades, master at none" situation. It does, however, cut out some of the more typical engineering roles. While developers just took on additional responsibilities, QA engineers and traditional Ops are forced to repurpose their skill set.

Re: How 'DevOps' Is Killing The Developer

#90

Post by gaius »

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.
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