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What do people think of DevX groups in general? I'm not sold, but in my (only n=1) experience, it'd be best to try to address the cultural problems that led to
by pyb 4y ago
What do people think of DevX groups in general? I'm not sold, but in my (only n=1) experience, it'd be best to try to address the cultural problems that led to the perceived need for DevX.
For instance : if build times are really bad, maybe it's because developers don't feel empowered to fix this as part of their day-to-day work.
- helen___keller 4y agoAt first I was going to disagree but now I'm rethinking. The need for these DevX groups comes from the fact that at Amazon's scale, there's lots of powerful tools, such as a massive internal build system and such. So, one answer is that you need DevX groups, because it makes no sense to have each of the thousands of developers learn how to tinker/fix the huge custom amazon build system (IE empowering individual devs). A second answer might be that there shouldn't be massive internal systems in the first place. A lot of the brilliance of AWS was reducing the differentiation between internal and external teams as consumers of services[0]. The buildup of massive internal systems probably shows that Amazon hasn't gone far enough, and DevX failures are just a symptom. [0] related https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/steve-yegges-famous-rant-on-google-vs-amazon/ https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/steve-yegges-famous-rant-on-...
- pyb 4y agoI can't speak for AWS ; my experience is at a much smaller company, where the DevX team was mostly busy with enforcing coding standards and other uniform "best practices" upon other teams. OTOH if your build system needs a lot of tinkering/deep knowledge to be used effectively, maybe it needs a redesign. This would be a job for the tools team rather than DevX.