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It's hard not to agree but this is a total loss. DevOps as a culture works, and what most organizations do doesn't. Why is it so hard to embed these specialist

It's hard not to agree but this is a total loss. DevOps as a culture works, and what most organizations do doesn't. Why is it so hard to embed these specialists in a vertical team and bring that cultural change? My guess is that they have two work streams and effectively two people to report to: The team leader, and their own manager/director. I think this is a problem for businesses since it complicates traditional hierarchies in ways they are not prepared to deal with. A counter example is QA, that does more often get embedded within a team and promotes a quality first mindset - why get this right and not DevOps? I'm confused.

tennis_80 3y ago
Spitballing here but perhaps it's because people don't realise the DevOps work that can be done in a team, rather than just what has to be done. I work in a cultural DevOps place at the moment, and often spend my time improving CI workflows, improving the local dev environment and upgrading dev tools to make it easier to write features when requests come in. I could easily spend my entire week doing things like this, and it seems to pay off as we have a very low cycle time and fix bugs within minutes. However if you have a non-technical manager - they struggle to see value in this work. DevOps becomes "the way we get the project we built into our production environment" which is usually quite a small piece of work compared to actually building the project. So it becomes - we don't need one per team, hmm, maybe they should be centralised so we can share their time between teams, and then you lose the culture DevOps was supposed to create.
ElevenLathe 3y ago
The problem is that management needs there to be zero slack in the system, or they don't think they're doing their job well enough. I've seen this pattern over and over: 1) a new vertical team is created, including seasoned devs and ops hands, a bulldog of a PM, maybe a business analyst and QA as well 2) the team is successful, creating a new product that legitimately brings value 3) executives want a new line of business and so spin up a new dev team, but figure they can do it on the cheap by having the old team's QA/PM/Ops folks work for the new team too. 4) this happens a few times and now we've spun out the support functions to separate teams with their own managers 5) we're back at square 0 Why do they do this? Because they need to increase "efficiency" in order to justify their existence. They're managers, after all, so they can't directly produce value. Their only hope is to increase the efficiency with which work gets done. The problem is that a maximally efficient team/system is a minimally resilient one, and there's no one in the org who thinks their job is to promote resiliency. There's also the problem that showing an "efficiency" like one guy doing the job of three is concrete and easy to prove. An increase in systems-level efficiency -- by having three people doing three jobs and therefore not blocking any of the other expensive professionals on those teams -- is seen as as theoretical and largely hokum. I don't know that there is a solution to this really. Even bronze age militaries experienced similar dynamics, so I'm not hopeful we can solve it by doing "agile". Also, sometimes they are right: there really isn't enough ops work on a vertical team to justify a whole full-time employee, and they really can produce more value consulting for multiple teams. I find that this is rare though, and takes a special person who is adept at context-switching. Most people aren't, and I don't know of a repeatable way of training or identifying these people, so it isn't a practical strategy for big orgs who need these things at scale.
shalmanese 3y ago
> A counter example is QA, that does more often get embedded within a team and promotes a quality first mindset - why get this right and not DevOps? I'm confused. I think you're a lot more optimistic than I am on the number of companies who have gotten QA right.

tennis_80 3y ago

Spitballing here but perhaps it's because people don't realise the DevOps work that can be done in a team, rather than just what has to be done. I work in a cultural DevOps place at the moment, and often spend my time improving CI workflows, improving the local dev environment and upgrading dev tools to make it easier to write features when requests come in. I could easily spend my entire week doing things like this, and it seems to pay off as we have a very low cycle time and fix bugs within minutes. However if you have a non-technical manager - they struggle to see value in this work. DevOps becomes "the way we get the project we built into our production environment" which is usually quite a small piece of work compared to actually building the project. So it becomes - we don't need one per team, hmm, maybe they should be centralised so we can share their time between teams, and then you lose the culture DevOps was supposed to create.

ElevenLathe 3y ago

The problem is that management needs there to be zero slack in the system, or they don't think they're doing their job well enough. I've seen this pattern over and over: 1) a new vertical team is created, including seasoned devs and ops hands, a bulldog of a PM, maybe a business analyst and QA as well 2) the team is successful, creating a new product that legitimately brings value 3) executives want a new line of business and so spin up a new dev team, but figure they can do it on the cheap by having the old team's QA/PM/Ops folks work for the new team too. 4) this happens a few times and now we've spun out the support functions to separate teams with their own managers 5) we're back at square 0 Why do they do this? Because they need to increase "efficiency" in order to justify their existence. They're managers, after all, so they can't directly produce value. Their only hope is to increase the efficiency with which work gets done. The problem is that a maximally efficient team/system is a minimally resilient one, and there's no one in the org who thinks their job is to promote resiliency. There's also the problem that showing an "efficiency" like one guy doing the job of three is concrete and easy to prove. An increase in systems-level efficiency -- by having three people doing three jobs and therefore not blocking any of the other expensive professionals on those teams -- is seen as as theoretical and largely hokum. I don't know that there is a solution to this really. Even bronze age militaries experienced similar dynamics, so I'm not hopeful we can solve it by doing "agile". Also, sometimes they are right: there really isn't enough ops work on a vertical team to justify a whole full-time employee, and they really can produce more value consulting for multiple teams. I find that this is rare though, and takes a special person who is adept at context-switching. Most people aren't, and I don't know of a repeatable way of training or identifying these people, so it isn't a practical strategy for big orgs who need these things at scale.

shalmanese 3y ago

> A counter example is QA, that does more often get embedded within a team and promotes a quality first mindset - why get this right and not DevOps? I'm confused. I think you're a lot more optimistic than I am on the number of companies who have gotten QA right.