Comment by derefr
7 years ago
It's kind of impossible to have it any other way. Ops is a cost center; you'll only have as many ops staff as you need to ensure your hair isn't on fire. And so ops staff only have enough time to solve problems with the most direct shortcut (usually by adding more components into the mix), rather than doing good Engineering to pay down the technical debt responsible for the problem.
If you have an infinite budget, by all means, hire developers whose jobs are to be prophylactic for ops tickets, by paying down tech-debt. But you'll have to guard that department with your life, because it'll be the first thing to be cut the moment anyone's looking to grow margin by shaving costs.
That is, until your customers start demanding higher SLAs and offering money for them... Maybe only a thing for really big companies, but when that happens, improving reliability and ops becomes someone's job. If not multiple people.
That doesn't mean no duck tape like solutions get used, but that the ones that cause problems get removed.