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Trunk-and-branches model for scaling infrastructure organizations

57 points by wavelander 5y ago

snorkel 5y ago
“Innovation teams shouldn’t be burdened with operational concerns” Surprising how prevalent this attitude still is. It leads to large Centralized ops teams are inevitably going to be a bottleneck. If developers need to routinely create tickets with some other team to do get their work done then clearly the org is heading the wrong way. the org needs to invest in more self-service automation and ops training the developers with a mindset of reducing the size and responsibilities of their ops team rather than just hiring more ops which makes the problem worse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cestith 5y ago
  So you're agreeing with the author of the article on that point.
  - snorkel 5y ago
    I’m not sure I agree because the advice from the article was mostly “grow the ops org” with a bit of push some ops responsibility back to dev teams, rather than seeing the ops org growth leads to further dependence on ops to get things done.
aahortwwy 5y ago
> we hired an earlier career engineer whose initial project was to handle all incoming provisioning requests So many places do this and it's such a waste. Early career engineers have the most to gain from high-quality experience, yet they're the most likely to be assigned shit-shoveling tasks. I've interviewed a lot of candidates with 2-4 years experience at prestigious tech companies who have no technical accomplishments they're proud of. Take two new grads with similar attitudes and academics. Put one on a team that assigns them interesting, challenging tasks that stimulate their growth. Put the other on a team that assigns them an endless queue of "service provisioning requests." Come back in ten years to see where they're at in their careers.
- phphphphp 5y ago
  Right. Shit-shovelling should be the responsibility of the shitters, so they learn to stop shitting so much. If engineers are never held to account for creating a mess, they’ll not stop creating a mess. People new to an organisation should be treated as an asset capable of bringing forward wonderful new ideas that can build on the best aspects of what already exists, not people who are still green enough to accept shit-shovelling work without threatening to quit.

57 points by wavelander 5y ago

“Innovation teams shouldn’t be burdened with operational concerns” Surprising how prevalent this attitude still is. It leads to large Centralized ops teams are inevitably going to be a bottleneck. If developers need to routinely create tickets with some other team to do get their work done then clearly the org is heading the wrong way. the org needs to invest in more self-service automation and ops training the developers with a mindset of reducing the size and responsibilities of their ops team rather than just hiring more ops which makes the problem worse.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cestith 5y ago
So you're agreeing with the author of the article on that point.
- snorkel 5y ago
  I’m not sure I agree because the advice from the article was mostly “grow the ops org” with a bit of push some ops responsibility back to dev teams, rather than seeing the ops org growth leads to further dependence on ops to get things done.

aahortwwy 5y ago

> we hired an earlier career engineer whose initial project was to handle all incoming provisioning requests So many places do this and it's such a waste. Early career engineers have the most to gain from high-quality experience, yet they're the most likely to be assigned shit-shoveling tasks. I've interviewed a lot of candidates with 2-4 years experience at prestigious tech companies who have no technical accomplishments they're proud of. Take two new grads with similar attitudes and academics. Put one on a team that assigns them interesting, challenging tasks that stimulate their growth. Put the other on a team that assigns them an endless queue of "service provisioning requests." Come back in ten years to see where they're at in their careers.

phphphphp 5y ago
Right. Shit-shovelling should be the responsibility of the shitters, so they learn to stop shitting so much. If engineers are never held to account for creating a mess, they’ll not stop creating a mess. People new to an organisation should be treated as an asset capable of bringing forward wonderful new ideas that can build on the best aspects of what already exists, not people who are still green enough to accept shit-shovelling work without threatening to quit.