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The last five years or so I've been pigeonholed into this "devops" space. Everything about it is a train wreck. I am currently seriously considering going back

The last five years or so I've been pigeonholed into this "devops" space. Everything about it is a train wreck. I am currently seriously considering going back to a plain old "feature development" role, at least while "DevOps" quiets down. Calling it "devops" has turned out to be a disservice. Teams are either made up of devs who don't know the sysadmin space and thus think the solution to every problem is "Write a new program in $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MONTH", and balk when you tell them "Ok, but... did you consider this thing that's been around 25 years?", or it's made up of what most companies had for "ops" people -- button-clickers who can follow a checklist like "Open Control Panel, double-click 'Add and Remove Programs...'" but are beyond hopeless in front of command line. In the wild, it's exceedingly rare to find people who can bridge both worlds reasonably. I appreciate that Google was able to formulate a functional SRE team, but... most companies aren't Google. Virtually everything that could've gone wrong as devops hit mainstream has gone wrong. Docker is all wrong. Kubernetes is a massive barf-fest. The obsession with "cloud everything" is not only a grotesque waste of money, it's insecure from first principles, as the emergence of practical speculative execution attacks has clearly demonstrated. crazypills.gif

not_real_acct 7y ago
> In the wild, it's exceedingly rare to find people who can bridge both worlds reasonably. I appreciate that Google was able to formulate a functional SRE team, but... most companies aren't Google. I agree with this comment. Personally, I got my start doing sys admin work, and after doing it for years I became pretty decent at writing scripts in Python and Ruby, and I picked up some Java and JavaScript along the way. In my experience, a lot of people who don't have a lot of experience tend to fall in one camp or the other: either they're operations people who can't code, or coders who don't follow best practices when it comes to operational work. But here's the problem that I keep seeing: Management, the ones writing the checks and doing the hiring, all they know about DevOps is what they've read in books and seen in seminars. Due to this, they have a bad habit of dismissing people who don't speak the DevOps "language." For instance, I did a job interview a few months back, and everything in the job description was in my wheelhouse. I was a great fit. But the hiring manager kept trying to coerce me into talking about my 'vision for DevOps.' Clearly, he had read a book or attended a seminar, and he wanted me to have some type of religious experience with him. But that's not my thing. I am too busy actually doing the work to read a 200 page book about mission statements.

not_real_acct 7y ago

> In the wild, it's exceedingly rare to find people who can bridge both worlds reasonably. I appreciate that Google was able to formulate a functional SRE team, but... most companies aren't Google. I agree with this comment. Personally, I got my start doing sys admin work, and after doing it for years I became pretty decent at writing scripts in Python and Ruby, and I picked up some Java and JavaScript along the way. In my experience, a lot of people who don't have a lot of experience tend to fall in one camp or the other: either they're operations people who can't code, or coders who don't follow best practices when it comes to operational work. But here's the problem that I keep seeing: Management, the ones writing the checks and doing the hiring, all they know about DevOps is what they've read in books and seen in seminars. Due to this, they have a bad habit of dismissing people who don't speak the DevOps "language." For instance, I did a job interview a few months back, and everything in the job description was in my wheelhouse. I was a great fit. But the hiring manager kept trying to coerce me into talking about my 'vision for DevOps.' Clearly, he had read a book or attended a seminar, and he wanted me to have some type of religious experience with him. But that's not my thing. I am too busy actually doing the work to read a 200 page book about mission statements.