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How 'DevOps' is Killing the Developer (2014)

52 pointsby zippy786over 9 years ago

13 comments

scurvyover 9 years ago
I've never met a developer that could setup a MPLS circuit or OSPF over an IPSEC tunnel. The author says that developers can do these things, but I highly doubt it. Let alone be proficient enough to do it in JunOS and IOS. Network operations should not be lumped in with devops.
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orthoganolover 9 years ago
The trend OP doesn&#x27;t like is primarily because &#x27;full stack&#x27; responsibilities, DBAs, release coordinators, etc. is probably the easiest it&#x27;s ever been, so you might as well have developers throw in some extra hours to do it. I&#x27;ve worked at a fortune 500 that used a Ruby gem called &quot;lol_dba&quot;... you can spin up environments and deploys trivially with PAASs, or at the least use various automation tools, scripts, and cookbooks for provisioning machines, running deploys, CI, etc.<p>OP seems to think &quot;full stack&quot; developers no longer devote time to writing code... &quot;This is why we see so many developers that can&#x27;t pass FizzBuzz&quot;... but really it just doesn&#x27;t take us long to do the non developer stuff because it&#x27;s just easy these days, maybe he&#x27;s not aware of the tools people use.
keyanpover 9 years ago
Interesting read, but I wish it wasn&#x27;t so inflammatory.<p>&gt; &quot;...release coordinators and the like are at the bottom of the totem pole. Why is it arranged like this? Because each role can do the job of all roles below it if necessary.&quot;<p>I find this to be belittling those who choose to work on a different part of the stack than the author. It seems to suggest there is an innate incompetence that keeps release engineers from functioning as &quot;developers&quot;. That couldn&#x27;t be further from the truth.<p>Release Engineering @ Mozilla: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7j0NDGJVROI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7j0NDGJVROI</a>
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endymi0nover 9 years ago
I always like the band analogy: The guitarists &#x2F; developers always think they can play the bass guitar, because it&#x27;s basically the same, just with less strings.<p>Yet, they don&#x27;t get that it&#x27;s all about groove, rhythm and dependability and are just way too unrelaxed and attention seeking for doing it right.<p>I&#x27;ll take a grumpy BOFH that wires together my AWS regions in his sleep and doesn&#x27;t make costly mistakes - because he measures twice and cuts once - over some kid trying DevOps any day :)
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jlawerover 9 years ago
I am an &quot;Infrastructure Engineer&quot; by job title, but really I am a jack of all trades. Many people working in small business need to wear many hats.<p>You can be deep on a single area (specialist) or be spread out (generalist). Larger businesses want specialists, small business want generalists.<p>Personally I am a generalist. I deal with security, servers, routers, switches, applications, laptops, Operating Systems, Backup, Databases, etc. I write code in python, java and starting to get better with go. Its a handful and I am always juggling things, but I also think that broad knowledge helps things. I understand TCP&#x2F;IP because I wrote a TCP&#x2F;IP stack. I feel I have a better understanding of the complex systems as I have a non trivial understanding of each part.<p>Its a very different working situation, but it has its advantages and I dread ever going back to a large corporate because of it. It isn&#x27;t as efficient compared to having a team of specialists, where everyone can spend 100% on their speciality, but on the other hand, you can often do things with surprisingly small teams.
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slowmovintargetover 9 years ago
Yarg!<p><i>Teams</i> do DevOps. It isn&#x27;t supposed to be an excuse to make developers do everything. It&#x27;s supposed to combine operations and development <i>on the same team.</i><p>This is just like the perversion of agility in development by &quot;Agile.&quot;<p>This, too, shall pass.
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mattkreaover 9 years ago
One coworker posted this a while back and I just dismissed it as someone afraid of something that they can&#x27;t handle.<p>While I understand the point.. I&#x27;m also a dev and I love &quot;DevOps&quot;. Aren&#x27;t we all doing this because we love problem solving? How is this not just another problem to tackle? I love having to figure how to automate mundane tasks (again.. this is just code.. not much different than we write elsewhere) to make sure I don&#x27;t have to manage any systems manually.<p>&#x2F;rant
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bradheover 9 years ago
If you&#x27;re a developer working on a service your primary objective is service delivery. It&#x27;s really, really difficult to do that without understanding (intimately) all the components in play from top to bottom.
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hliyanover 9 years ago
<p><pre><code> There are two recent trends I really hate: DevOps and the notion of the &quot;full-stack&quot; developer </code></pre> I have to question the wisdom of bunching these two together. One is about freeing the developer as much as possible from peripheral duties so he can concentrate on his primary responsibility - design and development. The other, at least to me, is more about avoiding systems composed of modules that don&#x27;t fit together properly, rather than getting more work done for less money.
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kriroover 9 years ago
The article seems all over the place. For example I think the conclusion<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;This is why we see so many developers that can&#x27;t pass FizzBuzz: they never really had to write any code.&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>Doesn&#x27;t really follow from the previous parts. DevOps is not the reason for this nor is the full stack developer trend.<p>The author also seems to start from an implied base premise that developers wouldn&#x27;t do devops&#x2F;fullstack if they had a choice. I disagree with that. Many developers are very interested in understanding the implications of their code better (more DBA skills help a ton for example) and quite a few <i>gasp</i> actually enjoy devops or understanding the entire product from start to finish at least on some level (full stack).<p>The benefits of DevOps also seem to be completely ignored. It&#x27;s precisely the fact that common development best practices are integrated with sysadmin, dba etc. knowhow which makes it useful. It&#x27;s not just &quot;let the dev be a sysadmin in a pinch&quot;. It&#x27;s systematically improve things by automating them (following development best practices instead of the hacked together bash script approach).<p>DevOps and fullstack dev are conflated throughout the entire article in a strange way which makes it kind of hard to argue.
tomohawkover 9 years ago
Devops may be a lame buzzword, but most interesting problems cross traditional boundaries. As a dev becomes more senior and wants to become more valuable, they&#x27;ll take it upon themselves to learn more about the other domains they interact with. The next step is they&#x27;ll start trying to take on these cross domain problems that become apparent at this point. What I&#x27;ve seen is that when devs stick to straight coding, the products they work on tend to be less successful and their careers tend to be less than they should be.
myVocatioover 9 years ago
To spoof J L parker, I was &quot;once a developer&quot;. Have played many roles since (PM,strategy consultant, VP, p&amp;l owner,...).<p>DevOp makes sense to me for building complex solutions..but, for different reasons than discussed here.<p>Consider this: a small team (usually 3-7 members) of &quot;jack of all trades&quot; is proven across industries where the team has to deliver a complex solutions under a very aggressive timeline ,requiring multiple skills. Two examples from my personal experiences: Strategy consulting - eg @ McKinsey (work includes interviewing executives, presentation, excel, data entry, hypotheses development and verification....) investment banking eg @ Goldman Sachs (work includes industry analysis, financial analysis, scenarios, presentation, excel, data entry, ...)<p>&quot;Jack of all trade&quot; model in terms of DevOps works because:<p>1) goal for the team w&#x2F; &quot;full-stack&quot; skills is to have a reliably working software solution 2) communication and management overhead increase significantly as the team size grows 3) complex solutions need different &quot;amount&quot; of various skills at different point in solution cycle 4) adding&#x2F; removing team members comes w&#x2F; significant cost to alignment
sargunover 9 years ago
Personally, I love DevOps. I&#x27;ve played on both sides of the fence. More ops than dev, I&#x27;ll admit.<p>The way I view DevOps is that you have end-to-end guarantees about software delivery. A lot of this draws from personal experience, so YMMV.<p>Story:<p>I was working in an organization where engineering had built a custom solution with their own database to a problem. It was using their own DB system, with the JVM, etc.. I was oncall for said service, because their DB kept getting into a poor state. My only real recourse to a page was (a) escalate to the devs (b) restart the service. I ended up furiously rewriting the service in Erlang over a weekend, and ended up getting told that my replacement was too complicated, and the previous one worked okay, because we could just restart it.<p>Take-aways: Without feeling the pressure, and side-effects from being woken up, and having to respond to on-call incidents for a service, it makes people put more value on the development time than operational time, although a service is very likely to be in operational time much longer than development time.<p>I have two other stories, but it&#x27;ll take some time to write, and it&#x27;s getting late, so I&#x27;ll type it up only if someone is interested. Just so I remember - the tale of LD_PRELOAD and HDFS, as well as the networks and root access.<p>1. I think that ops staff should provide shared services to services organizations (hosting, deployment, etc..) when N services need the shared service (when N&gt;2, depending on how many resources are available in your org).<p>2. I also think that ops staff should be able to &quot;consult&quot; on projects, as members of those teams during development. This is going to mean that those engineers are probably going to need to do some more development! Or, alternatively, the project team needs to be able to backpedal on some decisions if those ops consultants come in later on the project.<p>3. I think dev folks need to have end-to-end responsibility, including oncall, AARs, and on-call remediation. They need to take feedback from ops folks and act upon it, just as they would if product told them to do something.