Comment by NoSalt

20 days ago

I am a software developer. I went to college to learn software development. Two years ago, they tried to tack DevOps on to my job description. I told them "no thanks", then had to find another job. I found one and am MUCH happier not having to do that DevOps crap. No offense, but it a soul-draining undertaking, and I like writing code ... ONLY!

19 comments

NoSalt

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jpollock  20 days ago

I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team.

Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain.

Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain.

Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain!

The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control.

However, I think the author and I have different opinions on what DevOps is. DevOps isn't a full time role. It's what the engineer does to get their software into production.

  • antonvs  20 days ago

    This sounds very adversarial to me. I’m glad our devops team doesn’t think like you.

    • jpollock  20 days ago

      In my career, DevOps was never a separate organization. It was a role assumed by the code owners. SRE (is it up, is the hardware working, is the network working?) was separate, and had different metrics.

      Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with independent goals.

      Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from another, or is it company-wide?

  • bobanrocky  20 days ago

    The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. Try it once .. is my advice

    • esseph  20 days ago

      > The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill.

      IDK I've been called everything from: SysOp, SysAdmin, Network Engineer, Systems Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Half of those at different companies are just "DevOps" depending on the org.

    • jpollock  20 days ago

      I think there are different definitions of DevOps.

      I see a difference between a more definite operations team (SRE) vs an engineering team having responsibility for how their service works in production (DevOps).

      DevOps is something that all teams should be doing - there's no point in writing code that spends it's life generating problems for customers or other teams, and having the problems arrive at the owners results in them being properly prioritized.

      In smaller orgs, DevOps and SRE might be together, but it should still be a rotation instead of a fulltime role, and everyone should be doing it.

      Engineers who don't do devops write code that looks like:

        if (should_never_happen) {
    log.error("owner=wombat@example.com it happened again");
  }

      Where the one who does do devops writes code that avoids the error condition entirely (usually possible), or decides what the code should do in that situation (not log).

    • rirze  19 days ago

      It truly depends on the type of DevOps experience. I've avoided firefighting DevOps roles my career and I enjoy it. Having the space to step back and design intelligent dependent systems is satisfying.

dilyevsky  20 days ago

> I like writing code ... ONLY!

Boy do I have some bad news for you...

  • NoSalt  17 days ago

    And what would that news be? I have successfully doing this for almost 20 years. Yes, it means fewer promotions and less money, but I don't care. I value my sanity over money.

booleandilemma  20 days ago

Same thing happened to me at a company several years ago. It felt like they wanted me in two roles but were only paying me for one. Didn't take long for me to jump ship after that.

Joel_Mckay  20 days ago

DevOps is secretly spiral development.

Great if billing by the hour, and mostly unsustainable for products =3

raw_anon_1111  20 days ago

I am first and foremost still a software developer as far as my hands on keyboard job. I absolutely love being able to set up my own infrastructure without depending on glorified system administrators who call themselves “DevOps Engineers”. It’s all just code at the end of the day - setting up infrastructure involves writing yaml, HCL or actual code (CDk).