4 ms·

I've noticed an increasing reticence from senior programmers I know to have anything to do with DevOps. They see it as an aggravation they don't want in their l

I've noticed an increasing reticence from senior programmers I know to have anything to do with DevOps. They see it as an aggravation they don't want in their lives. Somebody posted a little while back about it being easy to find consulting work in DevOps with relatively little skill, especially AWS pricing, specifically because devs at companies aren't putting in the time to learn AWS properly. Has anybody else noticed the same? Or am I way off base?

corrral 4y ago
Large swaths of the developer community have long seen commercial-platform-specific certifications as a bad path, and DevOps seems pretty heavy on that. Goes back at least to the days when people were picking up MCSE and Cisco certs and such and trying to base a career on them (sometimes successfully! But a stigma definitely developed around those certs, too)
necovek 4y ago
I find it funny that you said "learn AWS properly" — have you loaded AWS services page recently? I've seen even very experienced DevOps engineers struggle to remember what was the service name to get into "parameter value store" (and I already forgot, and that was two weeks ago). AWS is a mess. You learn just enough to get by and long for the days of simplicity where you could manage a bunch of servers yourself. Oh, sorry, we are using Azure or GPC or OpenStack, that's an entirely new set of names for you to even know what you are looking for. K8S is just the same. Every company decides on an "easier to use tool" like k9s that you have to learn from scratch if you don't want to jump through hoops to just use kubectl directly. If anything is a definition of boring work, it's this: work to assemble a bunch of existing pieces without creating anything really new. I like being tasked with creating things, not being an assembly line worker who's got to learn terminology de jour.
rr808 4y ago
I think the way devops is right now is that a few great tech companies have it as an interesting role where there is time to write code and improve things. Most companies treat devops as regular ops, as in developers do all the interesting work and expect ops to be on call 247 to keep all the crappy bits running.
geekbird 4y ago
What's worse is that they want full-on programming, leetcode, algorithm mashing for jobs that end up being nothing more than slinging yaml or json and maybe tweaking a Jenkins job. That's the reality of DevOps - it's not primarily development, it's applying frameworks to infrastructure and deployment tasks. Get a senior sysadmin in operations and pay for a few courses in what you need from them.
datavirtue 4y ago
I just want it to work. Stick some kid on it who isn't going to realize how craptastic the job is for a few years. They get to feel like a ninja and I can get my PR in prod. DevOps is slightly more sophisticated system administration--janitorial work. With a much higher occurrence of vomit.

corrral 4y ago

Large swaths of the developer community have long seen commercial-platform-specific certifications as a bad path, and DevOps seems pretty heavy on that. Goes back at least to the days when people were picking up MCSE and Cisco certs and such and trying to base a career on them (sometimes successfully! But a stigma definitely developed around those certs, too)

necovek 4y ago

I find it funny that you said "learn AWS properly" — have you loaded AWS services page recently? I've seen even very experienced DevOps engineers struggle to remember what was the service name to get into "parameter value store" (and I already forgot, and that was two weeks ago). AWS is a mess. You learn just enough to get by and long for the days of simplicity where you could manage a bunch of servers yourself. Oh, sorry, we are using Azure or GPC or OpenStack, that's an entirely new set of names for you to even know what you are looking for. K8S is just the same. Every company decides on an "easier to use tool" like k9s that you have to learn from scratch if you don't want to jump through hoops to just use kubectl directly. If anything is a definition of boring work, it's this: work to assemble a bunch of existing pieces without creating anything really new. I like being tasked with creating things, not being an assembly line worker who's got to learn terminology de jour.

rr808 4y ago

I think the way devops is right now is that a few great tech companies have it as an interesting role where there is time to write code and improve things. Most companies treat devops as regular ops, as in developers do all the interesting work and expect ops to be on call 247 to keep all the crappy bits running.

geekbird 4y ago

What's worse is that they want full-on programming, leetcode, algorithm mashing for jobs that end up being nothing more than slinging yaml or json and maybe tweaking a Jenkins job. That's the reality of DevOps - it's not primarily development, it's applying frameworks to infrastructure and deployment tasks. Get a senior sysadmin in operations and pay for a few courses in what you need from them.

datavirtue 4y ago

I just want it to work. Stick some kid on it who isn't going to realize how craptastic the job is for a few years. They get to feel like a ninja and I can get my PR in prod. DevOps is slightly more sophisticated system administration--janitorial work. With a much higher occurrence of vomit.