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I think we teach developers wrong. I recently attended a devops workshop for one of our government agencies, to share knowledge like we do in the public sector,

by jaabe 8y ago

I think we teach developers wrong. I recently attended a devops workshop for one of our government agencies, to share knowledge like we do in the public sector, and their setup was quite impressive. At least it was, until it turned out that they had spent 8 people and two years making their toolchain and business processes work. Why would you do that? We’re not Netflix, we’re a country of 5 million. It’s at times like that I like to remind myself of how simple the stackoverflow setup was (still is?), but it also makes you wonder what made it happen. I mean, my municipality could manually deploy and operate hundreds of solutions for a hundred years and still have spent less time than 8 people building and implementing a devops toolchain over a period of two years. Heh. On the bright side, it seems to work well for them now that they have it. A lot of other people have spent the same resources and failed.

jacobolus 8y ago
I am not understanding what this means: > my municipality could manually deploy and operate hundreds of solutions for a hundred years and still have spent less time than 8 people building and implementing a devops toolchain over a period of two years.
- copperx 8y ago
  Likewise, I have no idea what this means: > We’re not Netflix, we’re a country of 5 million.
  - rudigergerm 8y ago
    I think he means that unlike Netflix, they don't serve a market of 150M+ subscribers
  - 0x38B 8y ago
    From a cursory look at his comment history, he's located in Denmark[1] and works in the public sector[2]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19412779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19412779 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419308
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - jaabe 8y ago
    We don’t need a massive operations setup when a single IIS instance can handle every citizen logging into X and not flinch. Yet more and more people are building a setup mirroring big players like Netflix. My point was that it might be a waste of resources to build something you don’t need.
- jaabe 8y ago
  I work in the public sector, our most expensive resource is the people who work for us. If you have 8 people spending two years building a toolchain, that means your tool chain cost 65712 hours to setup. In order to be worthwhile, it needs to save you more than 65712 hours on development and operations. If it fails to do that, then you’ve wasted tax payer money.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    The problem is that there are at least 5 or 6 different parts of your original comment that are completely lacking in context / elaboration, so that readers are left guessing about what you are trying to say. I don’t know what “their setup”, “making their toolchain and business processes work”, “the stackoverflow setup”, etc. mean, or what I am supposed to be comparing. If you can quantify, e.g. “they spent 16 man-years working on a development process that saves no more than two weeks for each new project, and they only have a few dozen projects to use it on”, then I would have a much clearer idea of the scope, even if I still didn’t know what this process was. On the flip side, if this new process makes the difference between a high-impact future project succeeding vs. failing or getting started vs. never getting tried, it might still be worth it. * * * At a higher level, having people spend some amount of their professional time on public-facing work that helps more than themselves or their local organization isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing. If many organizations and individuals spend time volunteering their time to larger-scale open projects, it can end up as a multiplier for everyone’s effort. All modern software projects (not to mention every other type of project) are built on millions of man-years of effort by huge numbers of people, most of whom didn’t recover much if any of the value they created.
Zimahl 8y ago
It's not just governments. I contracted at Nike for a project that had a boatload the developers. I was on the UI team and there were 6 of us building a UI the size of which I had built (almost) alone at the previous place I worked. This isn't the developers fault, it was all because businesses are so risk-averse that they must throw a boatload of money at something because failure looks really bad. Yet they fail all the time anyways. The only reason some businesses don't spend so much on resources is because they simply can't - they don't have the money to do so, which forces them to be streamlined and 'efficient'.

by jaabe 8y ago

jacobolus 8y ago

I am not understanding what this means: > my municipality could manually deploy and operate hundreds of solutions for a hundred years and still have spent less time than 8 people building and implementing a devops toolchain over a period of two years.

copperx 8y ago
Likewise, I have no idea what this means: > We’re not Netflix, we’re a country of 5 million.
- rudigergerm 8y ago
  I think he means that unlike Netflix, they don't serve a market of 150M+ subscribers
- 0x38B 8y ago
  From a cursory look at his comment history, he's located in Denmark[1] and works in the public sector[2]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19412779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19412779 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419308
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jaabe 8y ago
  We don’t need a massive operations setup when a single IIS instance can handle every citizen logging into X and not flinch. Yet more and more people are building a setup mirroring big players like Netflix. My point was that it might be a waste of resources to build something you don’t need.
jaabe 8y ago
I work in the public sector, our most expensive resource is the people who work for us. If you have 8 people spending two years building a toolchain, that means your tool chain cost 65712 hours to setup. In order to be worthwhile, it needs to save you more than 65712 hours on development and operations. If it fails to do that, then you’ve wasted tax payer money.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  The problem is that there are at least 5 or 6 different parts of your original comment that are completely lacking in context / elaboration, so that readers are left guessing about what you are trying to say. I don’t know what “their setup”, “making their toolchain and business processes work”, “the stackoverflow setup”, etc. mean, or what I am supposed to be comparing. If you can quantify, e.g. “they spent 16 man-years working on a development process that saves no more than two weeks for each new project, and they only have a few dozen projects to use it on”, then I would have a much clearer idea of the scope, even if I still didn’t know what this process was. On the flip side, if this new process makes the difference between a high-impact future project succeeding vs. failing or getting started vs. never getting tried, it might still be worth it. * * * At a higher level, having people spend some amount of their professional time on public-facing work that helps more than themselves or their local organization isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing. If many organizations and individuals spend time volunteering their time to larger-scale open projects, it can end up as a multiplier for everyone’s effort. All modern software projects (not to mention every other type of project) are built on millions of man-years of effort by huge numbers of people, most of whom didn’t recover much if any of the value they created.

Zimahl 8y ago

It's not just governments. I contracted at Nike for a project that had a boatload the developers. I was on the UI team and there were 6 of us building a UI the size of which I had built (almost) alone at the previous place I worked. This isn't the developers fault, it was all because businesses are so risk-averse that they must throw a boatload of money at something because failure looks really bad. Yet they fail all the time anyways. The only reason some businesses don't spend so much on resources is because they simply can't - they don't have the money to do so, which forces them to be streamlined and 'efficient'.