Comment by digi59404
16 hours ago
This is a valid story, and I have no doubt it’s real. I’ve heard and seen many stories like this that have happened.
But… I’m going to say the dirty, quiet, and unlikable thing out loud.
That had nothing to do with DevOps or its philosophies, processes, or patterns. That was bad leadership from the top down plain and simple. It’s likely not even the individual engineers faults. It’s leaderships fault for not setting clear objectives, implementing them, ensuring that the engineers had a real plan before beginning, and making sure no individual was too in charge of things.
Leadership in your case was likely career management who knew very little about technical items. Managers who were technical were probably shot down for not playing politics properly, not producing the correct “metrics” and “kpis”. So they moved on.
That’s a company culture issue that has little to do with tech.
I think the comment you are replying to is pointing out the terrible ramifications of just taking a random sysadmin team and expecting them to work in a full blown devops role. I too have seen similar situations play out, and in slight reverse - in their scenario the devops guys were calling all of the shots, ive also seen (and have lived) the opposite where devs call any and every shot on devops stuff and the devops team is treated as little more than glorified IT tech support but for devs (understandable how a business could come to a conclusion about why that makes sense, given how they perceive the sys admin -> devops progression). This sounds like it’s what you may want but it has its own sorts of problems - devs dont always know the right thing or what to ask for or what not to ask for. Really good devops guys are experts at guiding these conversations collaboratively.
I have known and worked with some really great former sys admins gone devops. I am working on mentoring one right now, but I have to be kind of insulting about it and be like “forget everything you knew before it probably won’t help now” which sucks because sys admins do form pretty decent understanding of OS’s, databases, networking, etc. however, when it comes to the code part and more importantly taking all of these concepts and applying them to reasoning about infrastructure code and complex systems is very hard for most people and you have to take a “im a total newb” mentality a lot of people dont seem easily capable of doing.
Valid assessment. The CIO in question did not have a technical background as was far more interested in fostering cliques than good engineering practices. The culture of the place was toxic as a result, it rewarded surveillance and not performance. It promoted fantasy land project managers who ignored reality.
Still, it made me very wary of the idea that devops is separate to development.
Managing relationships with project management and the difficulty that entails with most devops orgs where ive been is a symptom of the same problem I feel is being circled around. Good devops managers manage around these realities really well, can think of some specific examples in my head - it’s very much a several way conversation that should punish silos. however in practice it seems to reward it. If devops worked with and closely with devs you do not need layers of semi competent project managers in between acting like glorified note takers.