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I'm going to first answer this question ignoring the fact that you joined Oracle. I'll address my feelings about Oracle later. I would posit that in high funct

by zaphar 5y ago

I'm going to first answer this question ignoring the fact that you joined Oracle. I'll address my feelings about Oracle later. I would posit that in high functioning engineering organizations ever dev should get experience and in fact target a minumum of 1/3rd of their time be spent on operations work. Ignoring the way your application get's deployed, the environment it has to run in, the systems it needs to integrate with is a great way to build terrible software. Knowing all of that detail makes you a better developer and helps you develop better software. So I don't find it necessarily bad for your career if you end up doing some operations work as a developer. That said you do still want some level of actual development work present so if you don't have any of that then it's a sign of an unhealthy engineering organization. Now to address the elephant in your comment. Since you mentioned you joined Oracle my advice is to get out as soon as you can. That company is toxic. It's a toxic presence in the database marketplace regardless of how good the database itself is. I've heard it's also a toxic place to work. No idea how much of the workplace stuff is true as opposed to just rumor but it's enough to convince me never to work there.

HelloNurse 5y ago
Bait and switch on employee roles is an obvious indication that Oracle is untrustworthy. GTFO. On the other hand, as an engineer, expecting to do no Ops work is usually naive, regardless of what you are promised.
- bravetraveler 5y ago
  An organization may have a teams full of wonderful developers and operations alike - yet... when things break, it often takes expertise from both groups to wrestle back control. As a former operations person, I learned more about the code I deployed than I ever wanted; it all could've been avoided if development also learned a little about the operations side. It just makes us all better. Developers that actively show no interest in operating it tell me they don't want to support their work, honestly.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
The OP has months of experience working for oracle and you have apparently none but you feel compelled to tell them to leave based on rumors of what working there is like. Don't you think they might have a little more insight, or, at the very least, have already heard the rumors? What information do you think you're giving them that they wouldn't already have?
- zaphar 5y ago
  This is fair. However, the question itself suggests OP is already questioning his employment there. I think it's fair to read between the lines a little bit and let him know that Oracle has a reputation that fit's what sounds like his current experience.
bravetraveler 5y ago
As a former Operations (now architecture) person - completely agree. The developers that are surprised at every turn of deployment (or really the lifetime of the code/service) got there by focusing purely on the code and none [or to be fair, very little] on the environment in which it operates. This is how the "works on my machine" meme was started. We don't run the product or maintain SLAs on 'your machine', so it doesn't matter. It gives us an idea for what it should look like under normal operations, but that's as far as it goes. So many developers have told me crazy things like chmod 777, 'replace python2 with 3 for everything, not just me', and so on. The epitome of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I don't mind ops if I can use Docker, it isn't a hassle to login to the AWS console and hit deploy, but I have to play around on some box IT set up I'm going to be annoyed. Mainly because we wouldn't be managing individual servers like that if I was in IT.
gdfgjhs 5y ago
While I agree that it is important as a developer to understand operations side of things, but I disagree that developers should be doing operations. Not only developers accessing production environments is against various security principles but also it increases employees' cognitive load and reduces quality of work. There is a reason why in other fields, people tend to specialize instead of generalize. I think there is some misguided marketing/MBA ideas that developers can learn and do any and all technical work. I have seen in my current company quality of work and work satisfaction destroyed after higher-up decided that we don't need operations and developers should do DevOps now.
- zaphar 5y ago
  If your developer actually has to touch prod to do operations work then there is a whole lot more that needs to be fixed than just developers not understanding operations.
sonotathrowaway 5y ago
Is Oracle really that great a database nowadays though? I’ve had the impression they really have the market share they do because of the stickiness of enterprise db’s and the difficulties of switching, especially for large enterprises. I’ve found working on oracle much more challenging than MySQL/SqlServer, which I imagine have much better enterprise orientation than say Postgres.

by zaphar 5y ago

HelloNurse 5y ago

Bait and switch on employee roles is an obvious indication that Oracle is untrustworthy. GTFO. On the other hand, as an engineer, expecting to do no Ops work is usually naive, regardless of what you are promised.

bravetraveler 5y ago
An organization may have a teams full of wonderful developers and operations alike - yet... when things break, it often takes expertise from both groups to wrestle back control. As a former operations person, I learned more about the code I deployed than I ever wanted; it all could've been avoided if development also learned a little about the operations side. It just makes us all better. Developers that actively show no interest in operating it tell me they don't want to support their work, honestly.

giraffe_lady 5y ago

The OP has months of experience working for oracle and you have apparently none but you feel compelled to tell them to leave based on rumors of what working there is like. Don't you think they might have a little more insight, or, at the very least, have already heard the rumors? What information do you think you're giving them that they wouldn't already have?

zaphar 5y ago
This is fair. However, the question itself suggests OP is already questioning his employment there. I think it's fair to read between the lines a little bit and let him know that Oracle has a reputation that fit's what sounds like his current experience.

bravetraveler 5y ago

As a former Operations (now architecture) person - completely agree. The developers that are surprised at every turn of deployment (or really the lifetime of the code/service) got there by focusing purely on the code and none [or to be fair, very little] on the environment in which it operates. This is how the "works on my machine" meme was started. We don't run the product or maintain SLAs on 'your machine', so it doesn't matter. It gives us an idea for what it should look like under normal operations, but that's as far as it goes. So many developers have told me crazy things like chmod 777, 'replace python2 with 3 for everything, not just me', and so on. The epitome of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

willcipriano 5y ago
I don't mind ops if I can use Docker, it isn't a hassle to login to the AWS console and hit deploy, but I have to play around on some box IT set up I'm going to be annoyed. Mainly because we wouldn't be managing individual servers like that if I was in IT.

gdfgjhs 5y ago

While I agree that it is important as a developer to understand operations side of things, but I disagree that developers should be doing operations. Not only developers accessing production environments is against various security principles but also it increases employees' cognitive load and reduces quality of work. There is a reason why in other fields, people tend to specialize instead of generalize. I think there is some misguided marketing/MBA ideas that developers can learn and do any and all technical work. I have seen in my current company quality of work and work satisfaction destroyed after higher-up decided that we don't need operations and developers should do DevOps now.

zaphar 5y ago
If your developer actually has to touch prod to do operations work then there is a whole lot more that needs to be fixed than just developers not understanding operations.

sonotathrowaway 5y ago

Is Oracle really that great a database nowadays though? I’ve had the impression they really have the market share they do because of the stickiness of enterprise db’s and the difficulties of switching, especially for large enterprises. I’ve found working on oracle much more challenging than MySQL/SqlServer, which I imagine have much better enterprise orientation than say Postgres.