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That's not really true. I'm a SWE and Systems Engineer - it's really, really rare to find anyone that knows anything deep about both. DevOps/SRE may be on the s

by kodah 4y ago

That's not really true. I'm a SWE and Systems Engineer - it's really, really rare to find anyone that knows anything deep about both. DevOps/SRE may be on the same or adjacent teams as SWEs but they're still operating in loosely coupled domains of their own work and tooling - despite what it may appear from the outside. The exception on either side may be at the Staff+ level, where engineers have grown deeper end to end knowledge that slips into other domains. That said, Staff+ isn't a significant portion of the industry.

ungamedplayer 4y ago
I agree with this statement, there is clear delineation between back-end and infra. I imagine because there been significant time to stabalise expections and behavior that the front-end guys haven't had time to develop.
k__ 4y ago
Interesting. A few days ago I read how DevOps failed because people didn't understand it meant devs should do their own ops, instead they rebranded their ops roles to DevOps and called it a day. Here we are, talking about just that happening. Anyway, lately I was working with SaaS and serverless systems and had the impression that there wasn't much difference anymore between infra and code. Configuring and deploying an auth service, or a isn't much different from writing code for FaaS and deploying it.
- kodah 4y ago
  It depends on the scale you're operating at, not to be cliche. A small service with simple scaling constraints and that's designed intentionally to scale horizontally or vertically can make use of a lot of our the box systems that a single developer or even team of software engineers could wrangle. If the service needs better security guarantees, scaling triggered by advanced/atypical metrics, or cutting edge performance and tuning then you still need specialized people to realize those systems and maintain them. That's not to underscore how quickly a distributed system starts to get "chatty" and quickly falls into this space. Really all DevOps fundamentally meant was spreading APIs to all kinds of things in infrastructure that previously did not have APIs. Someone, unfortunately, took the leap that it also meant SWEs could do this now - ignoring huge domains of knowledge about distributed systems scaling, security, and performance that rest within the domain of systems people. In effect, it just meant more systems people need to be coding and doing systems thinking.

by kodah 4y ago

ungamedplayer 4y ago

I agree with this statement, there is clear delineation between back-end and infra. I imagine because there been significant time to stabalise expections and behavior that the front-end guys haven't had time to develop.

k__ 4y ago

Interesting. A few days ago I read how DevOps failed because people didn't understand it meant devs should do their own ops, instead they rebranded their ops roles to DevOps and called it a day. Here we are, talking about just that happening. Anyway, lately I was working with SaaS and serverless systems and had the impression that there wasn't much difference anymore between infra and code. Configuring and deploying an auth service, or a isn't much different from writing code for FaaS and deploying it.

kodah 4y ago
It depends on the scale you're operating at, not to be cliche. A small service with simple scaling constraints and that's designed intentionally to scale horizontally or vertically can make use of a lot of our the box systems that a single developer or even team of software engineers could wrangle. If the service needs better security guarantees, scaling triggered by advanced/atypical metrics, or cutting edge performance and tuning then you still need specialized people to realize those systems and maintain them. That's not to underscore how quickly a distributed system starts to get "chatty" and quickly falls into this space. Really all DevOps fundamentally meant was spreading APIs to all kinds of things in infrastructure that previously did not have APIs. Someone, unfortunately, took the leap that it also meant SWEs could do this now - ignoring huge domains of knowledge about distributed systems scaling, security, and performance that rest within the domain of systems people. In effect, it just meant more systems people need to be coding and doing systems thinking.