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If you’re managers and tech leads then why aren’t you making sure the people you’re supposed to lead obtain the understanding? We work with both high and low l

by devjab 3y ago

If you’re managers and tech leads then why aren’t you making sure the people you’re supposed to lead obtain the understanding? We work with both high and low level tools where I work, and in my experience there isn’t necessarily a lack of understanding among younger developers. The CS courses still teach you a lot of the basics, and to actually use what you call “hype” tools efficiently you typically need a rather good understanding of how they work. I actually don’t think we have enough abstraction, especially not in the DevOps field. In my opinion we’ve overcomplicated the deployment procedure without making sure it was abstracted. We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I’m actually fine with infrastructure as code, but it needs to be templated to the point that our developers simply “order”resources based on whatever template they want to deploy so that they don’t have to keep up with the constant changes or learn how networking in enterprise organisations work. As far as the CPU stuff goes. Young developers do a lot of low level code. We write a lot of embedded software for our solar plants, and a lot of the time, they seem far more capable and “modern” in their approaches than the “old guard” exactly because they’ve been taught the same curriculum but also all the lesson learned by the “old guard” along the way. That being said, it’s not really necessary for a lot of developers to keep an active knowledge of how an x86 CPU works, because it’s very unlike that they’ll have to work with it. It will often be far more useful to know how various types of ARM processors work, as that’s something a lot of us actively work with.

Viliam1234 3y ago
> We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I am afraid that many businesses prefer the vision where the software developers do the operations too, and the company can fire the operations department. Consider how much money you could save... before it all falls apart. Short term optimization is how managers get their bonuses. The trick is to move on to the next project before the old one falls apart. Then it becomes someone else's problem.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Agree that devs not needing to know this is how things should be, and that CTO/tech management however is not acting this way. It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC. If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at the start of a project, as hamfistedly as possible, probably over-provisioning so I don't have to go back to it anytime soon. All so I can move onto what I am paid to do - delivering functionality to stakeholders. Someone who deals with IaC as part of their full-time job will be the expert who can move more quickly & correctly through it. Sometimes this is just galaxy brain budget arb, where the infra org gets to show a cost save, to the detriment of the appdev org.
  - sgarland 3y ago
    > stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC Did you mean for this to be condescending towards ops? Because that’s how it sounds. Ops is not easy, at all. Even if you’re doing zero IaC, I defy the average dev to try to provision a Linux box from scratch and install, configure, tune, and maintain the stack you need to run your code. Throw IaC atop that, and now you need to understand declarative programming and OOP concepts to be able to do it efficiently. Then, there’s K8s… Not to mention the architecture side of things. Devs love to grab whatever shiny thing they saw on a Medium blog, even when it’s a poor fit to their problem (or their problem is unoptimized code). You probably do not need a columnar DB, you just need to normalize your tables and learn relational algebra.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      I do not mean to be condescending. I am being literal. Every job is hard, and the pay is not exactly commensurate with effort. Ops is absolutely hard and theres a lot to learn. And in doing so you generally may end up with DevOps teams with minimal to zero domain knowledge in what the company delivers to end users. So if you have a team of people who built a deep level of expertise in something over 10, 15, 20 years and that something is business facing, domain knowledge, etc.. then it is not of value to have their time spent on other tasks. Often these DevOps roles are filled by more junior staff at the earlier stages of their career. This is another reason the staffing is usually lower cost.

by devjab 3y ago

Viliam1234 3y ago

> We don’t need our software developers to know how our Cloud Networking and Virtual Networking works, we don’t need them to spin up resources and make various internal DNS and Firewall rules, we simply need them to focus on what they’re good at and then hand off the container to the operations department where people actually specialise in that knowledge. I am afraid that many businesses prefer the vision where the software developers do the operations too, and the company can fire the operations department. Consider how much money you could save... before it all falls apart. Short term optimization is how managers get their bonuses. The trick is to move on to the next project before the old one falls apart. Then it becomes someone else's problem.

steveBK123 3y ago
Agree that devs not needing to know this is how things should be, and that CTO/tech management however is not acting this way. It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC. If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at the start of a project, as hamfistedly as possible, probably over-provisioning so I don't have to go back to it anytime soon. All so I can move onto what I am paid to do - delivering functionality to stakeholders. Someone who deals with IaC as part of their full-time job will be the expert who can move more quickly & correctly through it. Sometimes this is just galaxy brain budget arb, where the infra org gets to show a cost save, to the detriment of the appdev org.
- sgarland 3y ago
  > stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC Did you mean for this to be condescending towards ops? Because that’s how it sounds. Ops is not easy, at all. Even if you’re doing zero IaC, I defy the average dev to try to provision a Linux box from scratch and install, configure, tune, and maintain the stack you need to run your code. Throw IaC atop that, and now you need to understand declarative programming and OOP concepts to be able to do it efficiently. Then, there’s K8s… Not to mention the architecture side of things. Devs love to grab whatever shiny thing they saw on a Medium blog, even when it’s a poor fit to their problem (or their problem is unoptimized code). You probably do not need a columnar DB, you just need to normalize your tables and learn relational algebra.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    I do not mean to be condescending. I am being literal. Every job is hard, and the pay is not exactly commensurate with effort. Ops is absolutely hard and theres a lot to learn. And in doing so you generally may end up with DevOps teams with minimal to zero domain knowledge in what the company delivers to end users. So if you have a team of people who built a deep level of expertise in something over 10, 15, 20 years and that something is business facing, domain knowledge, etc.. then it is not of value to have their time spent on other tasks. Often these DevOps roles are filled by more junior staff at the earlier stages of their career. This is another reason the staffing is usually lower cost.