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I think you’re onto something. From the article… > our role is to enable and facilitate developers in getting features into the hands of customers The problem

by harryf 4y ago

I think you’re onto something. From the article… > our role is to enable and facilitate developers in getting features into the hands of customers The problem here is this creates the wrong kind of incentives for developers… somehow elevating the to a level where they don’t have to care about how their code works in production. As someone that remembers being a developer back in the days of sysadmins, we were AFRAID of upsetting the operations people. If your code brought a server down, you were at least going to face some very awkward conversations. The cartoon “The Bastard Operator from Hell” immortalized that era. Meanwhile at one company I worked at years ago - an airline - the development team was responsible for keeping the system running 24/7. Nothing makes you think more carefully about your code in production than meeting a colleague on Monday morning who got woken up at 2am by your code failing. While I’m not arguing for hostility in the workplace, giving developers incentives to care about their code in production seems to me to be one of the things devops got wrong

dasil003 4y ago
Why is getting yelled at the next day more of an incentive than actually getting paged at 2am?
- harryf 4y ago
  Well either way there are direct consequences that the author of the code will feel - which is the point here. And usually pager duty is done in rotation, rather than you only get paged for your own code. It's one thing to ruin your own sleep, but if you ruin the sleep of the person that sits next to you, you start to think about consequences in production. It amazes me, for example, how often I've seen developers leaving their application logging, via something like log4j, in a default configuration where eventually it WILL fill up a disk, bringing down a server, rather than investing the 10 minutes it takes to switch the configuration to say "rotation" so that only a finite amount of space will be used, or just writing a bash script to clean up old files. And this is something that's very hard to pass on as best practice without sounding condescending - like the only way to learn to take stuff like this seriously is by dealing with the consequences in production.

by harryf 4y ago

dasil003 4y ago

Why is getting yelled at the next day more of an incentive than actually getting paged at 2am?

harryf 4y ago
Well either way there are direct consequences that the author of the code will feel - which is the point here. And usually pager duty is done in rotation, rather than you only get paged for your own code. It's one thing to ruin your own sleep, but if you ruin the sleep of the person that sits next to you, you start to think about consequences in production. It amazes me, for example, how often I've seen developers leaving their application logging, via something like log4j, in a default configuration where eventually it WILL fill up a disk, bringing down a server, rather than investing the 10 minutes it takes to switch the configuration to say "rotation" so that only a finite amount of space will be used, or just writing a bash script to clean up old files. And this is something that's very hard to pass on as best practice without sounding condescending - like the only way to learn to take stuff like this seriously is by dealing with the consequences in production.