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By departmentalize you get silos and reduced efficiency across teams, by going the other way and having full cycle developers you reduce the silo effect and get

By departmentalize you get silos and reduced efficiency across teams, by going the other way and having full cycle developers you reduce the silo effect and get alignment of incentives. Again the problem is that you need people who know a lot, and the mental load is very hard and not everybody is interested or able to handle that. As an old developer, this is very much how we operated before CI/CD was a thing in the early 2000. I remember we were responsible for developing, monitoring and support. In our team we had one week each where we did support and monitoring as the primary task.

piokoch 5y ago
I think this all depends on the complexity of operational tasks. If you have hosted MySql and a couple of servers, fine, developer can handle monitoring this. What if you have, say, DB2 cluster with HADR running, do you think you can monitor it and fix something if needed? Do you know ins and outs of share drives configuration using GFS. Kubernetes configuration details, if something goes wrong should every developer have sufficient knowledge to troubleshoot this? How about A10 load balancer, what average developer knows about this, can average developer fix failed virtual IP configuration or firewall rules on A10? Solving Red Hat Satellite cache issues? I don't even mention handling some complicated network setup with third parties connections through proprietary VPN solution, AWS cloud deployments using multitude of services that AWS offers or obscure stuff like zSeries IBM or Unisys mainframes, etc. Developer can be trained in all kind technologies, but there is truly a lot of them, this is huge body of knowledge, learning this will take a lot of time and money.
- nijave 5y ago
  I think you're conflating platform engineering and operations. A DB2 cluster with HADR is another application that some engineering team has stood up. A consumer of the database isn't responsible for the implementation; they're responsible for how their code interacts with and uses the system another (engineering) team built. In that regard, if a developer sees their application degrading due to an issue with the underlying platform, they'd engage the developers that built that platform (and ideally those developers have built a system to detect problems before the "end user" system starts degrading) In the same vein, it's not expected every developer understands kernel and hardware development--there are abstractions and boundaries in place that separate responsibility. The recurring theme is the person that configured/coded/built is responsible for operating it
pjmlp 5y ago
The world has changed a lot since 2000. There is no way to master language ecosystem X, specially large ones like Java, .NET (C#, F#, VB, C++/CLI), C++20, multiple OS stacks (Windows, GNU/Linux flavours, macOS, Android, iOS, ....) and then put Amazon, Azure, IBM Cloud, .... on top. In practice, if one doesn't silo into something, we all end up jake of all trades, master of none, jumping from whatever comes from IT Spring collection of the year into the next.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  On the other hand, if you started in 2000 (or before) it seems like everyone else knows very little indeed.

piokoch 5y ago

I think this all depends on the complexity of operational tasks. If you have hosted MySql and a couple of servers, fine, developer can handle monitoring this. What if you have, say, DB2 cluster with HADR running, do you think you can monitor it and fix something if needed? Do you know ins and outs of share drives configuration using GFS. Kubernetes configuration details, if something goes wrong should every developer have sufficient knowledge to troubleshoot this? How about A10 load balancer, what average developer knows about this, can average developer fix failed virtual IP configuration or firewall rules on A10? Solving Red Hat Satellite cache issues? I don't even mention handling some complicated network setup with third parties connections through proprietary VPN solution, AWS cloud deployments using multitude of services that AWS offers or obscure stuff like zSeries IBM or Unisys mainframes, etc. Developer can be trained in all kind technologies, but there is truly a lot of them, this is huge body of knowledge, learning this will take a lot of time and money.

nijave 5y ago
I think you're conflating platform engineering and operations. A DB2 cluster with HADR is another application that some engineering team has stood up. A consumer of the database isn't responsible for the implementation; they're responsible for how their code interacts with and uses the system another (engineering) team built. In that regard, if a developer sees their application degrading due to an issue with the underlying platform, they'd engage the developers that built that platform (and ideally those developers have built a system to detect problems before the "end user" system starts degrading) In the same vein, it's not expected every developer understands kernel and hardware development--there are abstractions and boundaries in place that separate responsibility. The recurring theme is the person that configured/coded/built is responsible for operating it

pjmlp 5y ago

The world has changed a lot since 2000. There is no way to master language ecosystem X, specially large ones like Java, .NET (C#, F#, VB, C++/CLI), C++20, multiple OS stacks (Windows, GNU/Linux flavours, macOS, Android, iOS, ....) and then put Amazon, Azure, IBM Cloud, .... on top. In practice, if one doesn't silo into something, we all end up jake of all trades, master of none, jumping from whatever comes from IT Spring collection of the year into the next.

Aeolun 5y ago
On the other hand, if you started in 2000 (or before) it seems like everyone else knows very little indeed.