I've been working as a DevOps engineer or an SRE or whatever you want to call it for the last few years. I think I've seen most of these before. Probably the m

I've been working as a DevOps engineer or an SRE or whatever you want to call it for the last few years. I think I've seen most of these before. Probably the most common incarnation I've seen of this is the Mandate + Responsibility - Knowledge ("Gambler"). Organizations declare one day "You build it, you own it" but they don't actually set up their teams for success. Probably what I would call this instead is "Finger Pointer" as it inevitably leads to infighting. This can look like many different things along a spectrum ranging from reasonable feedback ("why didn't anyone prevent me from commenting out all the broken tests") to not so reasonable ("it worked fine on my machine, so it's not my fault"). Around the same time is when organizations layoff all the sysadmins. "We're not throwing code over the wall anymore, so why would we keep them?" A huge waste of organizational knowledge and no one is left who knows how the systems work, and this increases infighting since now people are afraid for their own jobs. The second most common I've seen is Responsibility + Knowledge - Mandate ("Foot Soldier"). This is pretty similar to the above. An engineering team is given the golden tablets from above that they now need to do ops, but they aren't given any bandwidth to do so. They're somehow expected to have the same velocity as before with more work on their plates. Some developers will already have the knowledge (or the capability to learn) how to do it, but why would they work harder just to prove their leaders right? They inevitably leave the company. I wonder sometimes how this is pitched in leadership meetings or board meetings. I'm assuming there's lots of buzzwords like "modern" and "cloud" which are all true but somehow it's a surprise when people start quitting or app stability gets worse. I'm thinking of one company I worked at which encouraged engineering teams to be pizza sized, but mine was 10+ people because there was an understanding that half the team would quit in less than 12 months.