A colleague of mine once shared his lay sociological theory about dev vs ops, and if taken for what it is -- an essentialization -- it's an interesting perspect

A colleague of mine once shared his lay sociological theory about dev vs ops, and if taken for what it is -- an essentialization -- it's an interesting perspective. The idea is that ops people have inherited a blue-collar culture, whereas devs have inherited an office-worker/academic culture. Ops people conceive of their work as fundamentally operational: progress is measured in terms of actions taken, and while automation is greatly valued, there is nothing inherently "messy" with one-off fixes; the objective is to get things working now. The pathological case for this mindset is that of constantly being on the back-foot, responding to incidents with one-off fixes without recognizing that many of them share a common cause that could be addressed. Dev people conceive of their work as fundamentally intellectual: progress is attained when the problem is correctly conceived, at which point the solution follows naturally. While writing code is greatly valued, most effort should be spent understanding the problem; the objective is to solve it correctly, once and for all. The pathological case for this mindset is that of over-engineering by an ivory-tower idealist, disconnected from the messiness of real-world praxis. In nearly all orgs I've seen, the proportion of first-generation college grads is greater in ops teams than in dev teams. So too is the proportion of people who come from blue-collar families, or are mechanically inclined (ex: look around and see who tinkers with cars). Likewise, the proportion of people holding graduate degrees is greater in the dev crowd (ex: look around and see who's into math). It should hopefully be clear that neither is superior to the other. The point is rather that the divide between dev and ops is partly sociological, which means it is largely based on values. Ops will tend to over-value "honest hard work" and dev will tend to over-value "clear articulate thought". There is also some latent, historical tension between these sociological groups, which has a funny way of masquerading as a technical problem. It is helpful to view arguments about "just ship it" vs "design it the right way" through this lens. Far from being a cute "just so" story, it's been my experience that this dynamic is very important for two reasons: (1) it's harder than you might expect to foster the sense of common destiny required for real "devops"-style collaboration, and (2) each side of the dev-ops divide has a lot to gain from learning when the other side's mindset is helpful, and how to cultivate it in themselves.