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Thanks for asking! Actually, although my official role is DevOps engineer, I spend 90% of my time writing application code. I am part of an engineering team and

by jonaf 10y ago

Thanks for asking! Actually, although my official role is DevOps engineer, I spend 90% of my time writing application code. I am part of an engineering team and simply consult the team on operations. This is how we do DevOps at my place of employment. In a nutshell, your thoughts are probably accurate in most cases, but for me, personally, I do software engineering full time.

rizzom5000 10y ago
How productive would you gauge yourself? I find my productivity drops off significantly on days when I have alot of distractions. I suppose I'm being productive in other ways on those days, but sometimes it seems like I've accomplished little.
- jonaf 10y ago
  Over much time, I have learned that my personal feelings about productivity and my actual contribution are wildly different. This is because my sentiment toward work I want to do and my actual work can be different. This really is tangential to the original subject matter, but what I often see is that people feel less productive when the fix a bug than when they ship a feature; they feel less productive when they resolve some service outage rather than when they fix a bug; and they feel less productive when they hold a design review for some operations process improvement than when they resolve some service outage. As this hierarchy descends, I find that "having a discussion with a colleague" is often at the bottom. But in reality, all of these types of work are equally valuable and important. Their literal value may be different, but for an organization to operate, they are all about the same. Sometimes there is no "literal" value -- teaching an intern about git seems like a waste of time, like you're not being productive, but when they eventually get hired and ship a really valuable feature, your work enabled that. With all of this in mind (and by the way, if your direct manager disagrees with the above statements, I recommend finding a new employer), I consider my productivity to be mostly the same on a day to day basis, with some ebb and flow. This despite interruptions or what my work environment is. I feel this way because of my perception that all types of work are equal, I just spend most of my time doing software engineering work specifically. Consider the metric for your productivity in terms of value, not sprint points or lines of code or even "number of features shipped." What "value" means to you, your boss, and your organization varies.

by jonaf 10y ago

rizzom5000 10y ago

How productive would you gauge yourself? I find my productivity drops off significantly on days when I have alot of distractions. I suppose I'm being productive in other ways on those days, but sometimes it seems like I've accomplished little.

jonaf 10y ago
Over much time, I have learned that my personal feelings about productivity and my actual contribution are wildly different. This is because my sentiment toward work I want to do and my actual work can be different. This really is tangential to the original subject matter, but what I often see is that people feel less productive when the fix a bug than when they ship a feature; they feel less productive when they resolve some service outage rather than when they fix a bug; and they feel less productive when they hold a design review for some operations process improvement than when they resolve some service outage. As this hierarchy descends, I find that "having a discussion with a colleague" is often at the bottom. But in reality, all of these types of work are equally valuable and important. Their literal value may be different, but for an organization to operate, they are all about the same. Sometimes there is no "literal" value -- teaching an intern about git seems like a waste of time, like you're not being productive, but when they eventually get hired and ship a really valuable feature, your work enabled that. With all of this in mind (and by the way, if your direct manager disagrees with the above statements, I recommend finding a new employer), I consider my productivity to be mostly the same on a day to day basis, with some ebb and flow. This despite interruptions or what my work environment is. I feel this way because of my perception that all types of work are equal, I just spend most of my time doing software engineering work specifically. Consider the metric for your productivity in terms of value, not sprint points or lines of code or even "number of features shipped." What "value" means to you, your boss, and your organization varies.