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Personally I think DevOps is like religion. It means whatever someone wants it to mean. Some companies think DevOps means having an automated pipeline for build

Personally I think DevOps is like religion. It means whatever someone wants it to mean. Some companies think DevOps means having an automated pipeline for building, testing, and shipping code. Other companies think it means micro-services. Others think it means making developers do DBA / SysAdmin work. All of these things are fine for companies to do. How you run your org is on you. But I wish companies would go deeper than "DevOps" when putting up job posting requirements. That's like saying they do "security". There's a lot of different ways that can be interpreted. I (as an applicant) only know a handful of those interpretations really well, so it's important that companies clarify these terms in their job descriptions. This way they have the right candidates applying.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
> Some companies think DevOps means having an automated pipeline for building, testing, and shipping code. This seems to be the most common interpretation, but I largely agree with you on no hard and fast rule here.
- ownagefool 7y ago
  It's because it ultimately does mean that. I mean, sure, if we're being pedantic about it, devops is about the silos coming closer together, cross learning, culture and what have you, etc. But the outcome of that the cross learning is pretty much release engineering, that includes the above and the products giving more data for helping run them, and simplicity leading to being easier to fix, and do the aforementioned things. I also think we should just get over it and probably just adopt SRE, Release Engineer and Product. Not because I <3 google, just because the split makes a tad bit more sense.
n42 7y ago
my bar for "DevOps" on my (SaaS) team is that the engineers responsible for the platform the product runs on are involved in the discussions about the product we build. everything that comes after that: pipelines, testing, release engineering, migrations, post-mortems, whatever -- it's all a result of your infrastructure engineers having a stake in the thing your company is building. I have yet to see a definition of DevOps that invoked some sort of tech stack that made any sense to me. the processes and tools emerge from a cooperation between stakeholders and a shared responsibility for the delivered product.
duxup 7y ago
DevOps is the channel in slack I check when my code didn't update. That the directs me to somewhere else where I just sort of randomly click things until it works or gets worse. But yeah I'm with you on the wild definitions, it can be anything from some overnight IT grunt, to something far more respected and involved depending on how the company did things.
arendtio 7y ago
> But I wish companies would go deeper than "DevOps" when putting up job posting requirements. I am not sure this problem is limited to DevOps. Once I applied for a job thinking I understood the job description. During the interview, I had to find out that they put only half the job in the description (the good parts). Afterward, I took a look on the job description again asking myself if I misinterpreted the description but came to the conclusion that they just didn't want to write about the downsides of the job (not even in management speak like 'You love a challenge?').
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  Firms don't want you to know it, but they are struggling to hire competent IT professionals to an extreme degree. Recruiters are being regularly ghosted (like they used to do to candidates) and turn over is increasing. That's why you see them resulting to tricks like this. One thing to keep in mind is that most managers working today cut their teeth when unemployment was at 10% or so, as such they really only know about bait and switch tactics and the stick. Carrots aren't something that really fits into their mental model. In short, to anyone reading this. Now is the time to make your move.
  - Izkata 7y ago
    > Recruiters are being regularly ghosted (like they used to do to candidates) Not sure if this is the same thing (with "ghosted"), but I have 3 rock-bottom criteria before I'll respond to a recruiter's email: * Send to the email on my resume, not my personal one. * Show that they've read (or at least keyword-matched) my resume. * Something in the job description should at least be vaguely enticing, such as a technology I have on my resume. The same thing can hit both points 2 and 3, the depending on how the email is structured. In nearly 10 years, a grand total of one recruiter got all these points. Half of them failed on the first one.
nabdab 7y ago
People can’t agree what devops is, sure. But I feel like it’s extremely easy to tell what devops isn’t. If you don’t have any confidence in your releases before you’ve done extensive ad-hoc manual probing you aren’t doing devops. If your using oracle and Delphi even though none of the developers would chose it because “that’s what management decided” you are not doing devops. The rest of the story is just about the tooling and management decisions that support getting out of those pits. You use micro services because it allows developers to use whichever tools they want as long as they solve the task. You use automated tests and deployment pipelines so the team and organizational procedure to be confident in releases shifts from becoming “talk to Tom and get his blessing after he’s spend a week probing everything” to “well if it passed all tests and deployed then it’s a go. It’s not like the technical issues suddenly disappear. You need to set up your tests to a level where you are confident in the pipeline. You still need to spend the time and resources making sure your microservice infrastructure is working. But at the end of it you’ve removed the power of the gits who where previously controlling the techs allowed and the releases, and your letting teams move forwards through proving their work rather than constant audiences with individuals who are gatekeepers because they spend 20 years in the same organization and feel that everything invented in the last decade is scary.
- kelnos 7y ago
  > If your using oracle and Delphi even though none of the developers would chose it because “that’s what management decided” you are not doing devops. What does that have to do with DevOps? Clearly that's not an ideal situation, but that has nothing to do with CI/CD pipelines, developers handling operations work, etc.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    I think they're driving at "management is dictating technical decisions"; many people view DevOps as a cultural shift (if not a mindset) that includes empowering developers. Interestingly, your question of illustrative of the "DevOps has no clear, standard definition" problem.
- weberc2 7y ago
headmelted 7y ago
> Personally I think DevOps is like religion As long as no-one is knocking on my door asking if I have five minutes to discuss Agile development methodologies. I could reasonably defend most of what people attach to the "DevOps" buzzword as sane practices most of us were already doing before the hoopla. Agile (with a capital A) is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. Kill off that cult and you can DevOps my work with containerized OWASP Gitflows until the end of days for all I care. Snark aside, Dave Thomas makes a compelling argument for trying to choose terms that are as hard as possible for others to co-opt for selling snake oil (anecdotally, I encounter people on a weekly basis who are self-described Agile or DevOps experts, but have no technical background whatsoever).
- procinct 7y ago
  What’s your preferred methodology to Agile? Waterfall?
  - headmelted 7y ago
    I quite like this as a good resource: https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/. Whatever gets the work done and doesn't cause unnecessary burdens while adding no measurable value is good with me at this point. I'd make do with anything but Agile, which needs to be shot. Out of a cannon. Into the Sun.
    - christopoulos 7y ago
      Genuinely curious, what is it that you don’t like about Agile? I mean, the concept, the processes? The lack of something or too much of something?
      - mongol 7y ago
        There are cult-like tendencies in part of the agile community. I don't see it in the teams I have worked in, but in forums on LinkedIn, by those that see their career as agile specialists, experts in coaching the true way to perform agile software development. Many of them see themselves as catalysts, and that they with clever questioning will make teams grow. They don't themselves want to have a delivery responsibility, but they want to stand on the sidelines and "coach".
xellisx 7y ago
> Others think it means making developers do DBA / SysAdmin work. I've been in that spot many times. In my last job, I did engineering (networking, server, etc) / support for 7 data centers. We started to support of 3rd party "cloud" products, and then they dropped the DCs they gave me the title of DevOps Engineer IV. When they did that, I didn't have any Dev or Ops responsibilities.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

> Some companies think DevOps means having an automated pipeline for building, testing, and shipping code. This seems to be the most common interpretation, but I largely agree with you on no hard and fast rule here.

ownagefool 7y ago
It's because it ultimately does mean that. I mean, sure, if we're being pedantic about it, devops is about the silos coming closer together, cross learning, culture and what have you, etc. But the outcome of that the cross learning is pretty much release engineering, that includes the above and the products giving more data for helping run them, and simplicity leading to being easier to fix, and do the aforementioned things. I also think we should just get over it and probably just adopt SRE, Release Engineer and Product. Not because I <3 google, just because the split makes a tad bit more sense.

n42 7y ago

my bar for "DevOps" on my (SaaS) team is that the engineers responsible for the platform the product runs on are involved in the discussions about the product we build. everything that comes after that: pipelines, testing, release engineering, migrations, post-mortems, whatever -- it's all a result of your infrastructure engineers having a stake in the thing your company is building. I have yet to see a definition of DevOps that invoked some sort of tech stack that made any sense to me. the processes and tools emerge from a cooperation between stakeholders and a shared responsibility for the delivered product.

duxup 7y ago

DevOps is the channel in slack I check when my code didn't update. That the directs me to somewhere else where I just sort of randomly click things until it works or gets worse. But yeah I'm with you on the wild definitions, it can be anything from some overnight IT grunt, to something far more respected and involved depending on how the company did things.

arendtio 7y ago

> But I wish companies would go deeper than "DevOps" when putting up job posting requirements. I am not sure this problem is limited to DevOps. Once I applied for a job thinking I understood the job description. During the interview, I had to find out that they put only half the job in the description (the good parts). Afterward, I took a look on the job description again asking myself if I misinterpreted the description but came to the conclusion that they just didn't want to write about the downsides of the job (not even in management speak like 'You love a challenge?').

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
Firms don't want you to know it, but they are struggling to hire competent IT professionals to an extreme degree. Recruiters are being regularly ghosted (like they used to do to candidates) and turn over is increasing. That's why you see them resulting to tricks like this. One thing to keep in mind is that most managers working today cut their teeth when unemployment was at 10% or so, as such they really only know about bait and switch tactics and the stick. Carrots aren't something that really fits into their mental model. In short, to anyone reading this. Now is the time to make your move.
- Izkata 7y ago
  > Recruiters are being regularly ghosted (like they used to do to candidates) Not sure if this is the same thing (with "ghosted"), but I have 3 rock-bottom criteria before I'll respond to a recruiter's email: * Send to the email on my resume, not my personal one. * Show that they've read (or at least keyword-matched) my resume. * Something in the job description should at least be vaguely enticing, such as a technology I have on my resume. The same thing can hit both points 2 and 3, the depending on how the email is structured. In nearly 10 years, a grand total of one recruiter got all these points. Half of them failed on the first one.

nabdab 7y ago

People can’t agree what devops is, sure. But I feel like it’s extremely easy to tell what devops isn’t. If you don’t have any confidence in your releases before you’ve done extensive ad-hoc manual probing you aren’t doing devops. If your using oracle and Delphi even though none of the developers would chose it because “that’s what management decided” you are not doing devops. The rest of the story is just about the tooling and management decisions that support getting out of those pits. You use micro services because it allows developers to use whichever tools they want as long as they solve the task. You use automated tests and deployment pipelines so the team and organizational procedure to be confident in releases shifts from becoming “talk to Tom and get his blessing after he’s spend a week probing everything” to “well if it passed all tests and deployed then it’s a go. It’s not like the technical issues suddenly disappear. You need to set up your tests to a level where you are confident in the pipeline. You still need to spend the time and resources making sure your microservice infrastructure is working. But at the end of it you’ve removed the power of the gits who where previously controlling the techs allowed and the releases, and your letting teams move forwards through proving their work rather than constant audiences with individuals who are gatekeepers because they spend 20 years in the same organization and feel that everything invented in the last decade is scary.

kelnos 7y ago
> If your using oracle and Delphi even though none of the developers would chose it because “that’s what management decided” you are not doing devops. What does that have to do with DevOps? Clearly that's not an ideal situation, but that has nothing to do with CI/CD pipelines, developers handling operations work, etc.
- weberc2 7y ago
  I think they're driving at "management is dictating technical decisions"; many people view DevOps as a cultural shift (if not a mindset) that includes empowering developers. Interestingly, your question of illustrative of the "DevOps has no clear, standard definition" problem.
weberc2 7y ago

headmelted 7y ago

> Personally I think DevOps is like religion As long as no-one is knocking on my door asking if I have five minutes to discuss Agile development methodologies. I could reasonably defend most of what people attach to the "DevOps" buzzword as sane practices most of us were already doing before the hoopla. Agile (with a capital A) is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. Kill off that cult and you can DevOps my work with containerized OWASP Gitflows until the end of days for all I care. Snark aside, Dave Thomas makes a compelling argument for trying to choose terms that are as hard as possible for others to co-opt for selling snake oil (anecdotally, I encounter people on a weekly basis who are self-described Agile or DevOps experts, but have no technical background whatsoever).

procinct 7y ago
What’s your preferred methodology to Agile? Waterfall?
- headmelted 7y ago
  I quite like this as a good resource: https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/. Whatever gets the work done and doesn't cause unnecessary burdens while adding no measurable value is good with me at this point. I'd make do with anything but Agile, which needs to be shot. Out of a cannon. Into the Sun.
  - christopoulos 7y ago
    Genuinely curious, what is it that you don’t like about Agile? I mean, the concept, the processes? The lack of something or too much of something?
    - mongol 7y ago
      There are cult-like tendencies in part of the agile community. I don't see it in the teams I have worked in, but in forums on LinkedIn, by those that see their career as agile specialists, experts in coaching the true way to perform agile software development. Many of them see themselves as catalysts, and that they with clever questioning will make teams grow. They don't themselves want to have a delivery responsibility, but they want to stand on the sidelines and "coach".

xellisx 7y ago

> Others think it means making developers do DBA / SysAdmin work. I've been in that spot many times. In my last job, I did engineering (networking, server, etc) / support for 7 data centers. We started to support of 3rd party "cloud" products, and then they dropped the DCs they gave me the title of DevOps Engineer IV. When they did that, I didn't have any Dev or Ops responsibilities.