8 ms·

Ime this unravels quickly as the team and stack complexity grows and product engineering starts shipping software that’s very difficult/expensive to operate. Th

Ime this unravels quickly as the team and stack complexity grows and product engineering starts shipping software that’s very difficult/expensive to operate. The whole idea behind devops was to avoid this death spiral by giving engineers ownership and responsibility to run their own software. The problem was (still is) that off-the-shelf tooling is just not there and requires very skilled/experience devs to use it effectively. Hence dedicated teams got created and the whole thing died on the vine. Devops as a movement simply doesn’t scale.

wizofaus 4y ago
I don't see it as massively different to specialisation between front and back-end developers though - we're all devs, we're all comfortable with reading/writing code, but whereas my specialty and focus is on application-level (typically backend) code, the DevOps guys are specialised in writing IaC scripts etc. Yes, in principle, any dev could do it all, but there becomes a point that the mental load from juggling too many technologies outweighs your ability to be productive. And some types of development just take different mindsets - I've done my share of front-end/UI-type development in the past, and can easily pick it up again if needed, but I can't say I find it super satisfying, and it's nearly always going to be produce a better result for everyone to hand it off to someone who does. Likewise for CI/CD scripting. And it also happens that if your primary focus is on the scripts and tools necessary to get software deployed to a particular hosting environment, you're likely to have the skills necessary to take care of the day-to-day sysadmin side of things for that environment (indeed, most "manual" changes to the environment are only done as a last resort, and would be wiped by the next deployment anyway, unless the scripts are modified appropriately too).

wizofaus 4y ago

I don't see it as massively different to specialisation between front and back-end developers though - we're all devs, we're all comfortable with reading/writing code, but whereas my specialty and focus is on application-level (typically backend) code, the DevOps guys are specialised in writing IaC scripts etc. Yes, in principle, any dev could do it all, but there becomes a point that the mental load from juggling too many technologies outweighs your ability to be productive. And some types of development just take different mindsets - I've done my share of front-end/UI-type development in the past, and can easily pick it up again if needed, but I can't say I find it super satisfying, and it's nearly always going to be produce a better result for everyone to hand it off to someone who does. Likewise for CI/CD scripting. And it also happens that if your primary focus is on the scripts and tools necessary to get software deployed to a particular hosting environment, you're likely to have the skills necessary to take care of the day-to-day sysadmin side of things for that environment (indeed, most "manual" changes to the environment are only done as a last resort, and would be wiped by the next deployment anyway, unless the scripts are modified appropriately too).