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Looks like someone else has been around the block a couple times. There are going to be massive opportunities for good consultants in this muddle. I'm currentl

by _jal 9y ago

Looks like someone else has been around the block a couple times. There are going to be massive opportunities for good consultants in this muddle. I'm currently watching one train wreck, thankfully at a distance. Nothing novel - they moved ops under the engineering umbrella. The engineering manager not only has no clue what the differences in managing the two are, but seems unaware that there are any. So of course the good system people quickly left, the engineers are slowly discovering that containers don't magically erase the need for understanding how things work, and they're spending six figures a month on K8s consultants. We seem to have a generational cycle on IT/sysadmin/ops hate. As you get older, it becomes amusing watching every new batch of engineers learn why they exist.

devonkim 9y ago
This kind of cycle is part of why I’m regretting 13+ years in different incarnations of ops. Developers have always gotten business priority over ops unless it comes to security and I’ve seen far more places brush aside even security in the name of more features than should be healthy to one’s sanity. Even at the peak of ops when everyone was scrambling to get security engineers and such, I simply never heard of some bright kid graduating from school and getting $200k+ comp packages... for being in ops, even for DoD cyber security BS. Ops is a cost center even in the cutting edge of organizations in this respect. Few companies will make more money by throwing more money at ops that is. Combined with the serious health hazards of being on-call I’m a bit worried when I hear about companies asking their developers to get more involved with ops.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Yeah. "DevOps" originated as a naive attempt to fix this issue by eliminating the "wall" between the roles, but it was quickly misunderstood. The old-school, master of the universe-style sysadmin who had to use advanced wizardry developed out of deep knowledge and intuition about how the computer worked at a fundamental level is still the ideal developer OR operator. But it's hard to find people who even understand this role, let alone people who are hiring for it. People only seem to understand pigeonholes, despite occasional well-intended attempts to unify, that generally have disastrous results. You just need a special breed to get someone who can really function up and down the stack, and every company should seek out, train, and develop such highly-empowered "tech special forces", for lack of a better term. It's tragic that so many companies don't realize this.

by _jal 9y ago

devonkim 9y ago

This kind of cycle is part of why I’m regretting 13+ years in different incarnations of ops. Developers have always gotten business priority over ops unless it comes to security and I’ve seen far more places brush aside even security in the name of more features than should be healthy to one’s sanity. Even at the peak of ops when everyone was scrambling to get security engineers and such, I simply never heard of some bright kid graduating from school and getting $200k+ comp packages... for being in ops, even for DoD cyber security BS. Ops is a cost center even in the cutting edge of organizations in this respect. Few companies will make more money by throwing more money at ops that is. Combined with the serious health hazards of being on-call I’m a bit worried when I hear about companies asking their developers to get more involved with ops.

cookiecaper 9y ago
Yeah. "DevOps" originated as a naive attempt to fix this issue by eliminating the "wall" between the roles, but it was quickly misunderstood. The old-school, master of the universe-style sysadmin who had to use advanced wizardry developed out of deep knowledge and intuition about how the computer worked at a fundamental level is still the ideal developer OR operator. But it's hard to find people who even understand this role, let alone people who are hiring for it. People only seem to understand pigeonholes, despite occasional well-intended attempts to unify, that generally have disastrous results. You just need a special breed to get someone who can really function up and down the stack, and every company should seek out, train, and develop such highly-empowered "tech special forces", for lack of a better term. It's tragic that so many companies don't realize this.