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I have only rarely been a part of teams that actually valued its ops/infrastructure/platform teams. I think the biggest factors affecting burnout for me are lon

I have only rarely been a part of teams that actually valued its ops/infrastructure/platform teams. I think the biggest factors affecting burnout for me are long, inflexible on-call hours, and the fact that a huge majority of companies see ops as a cost to be reduced/minimized as much as possible, not a core part of the business. I've seen this attitude even when the platform itself is a product. Work done by ops is frequently invisible when it's going well, and extremely visible when it's not. This phenomenon also leads to patterns in ops infrastructure teams where it's reaction driven, and not preventative - it looks way better to management teams to be the one to swoop in at 3 am to save the day rather than preventing the outage in the first place, which can be difficult to quantify.

diarrhea 3y ago
One of my long term plans is to do software development in the domain of infrastructure. Think developing Kubernetes itself instead of “just” using it. Now you say that even where that infrastructure was the product, the work was still regarded poorly. That is so sad! How come such a thing can exist? Wouldn’t the business fail in the medium term?
121789 3y ago
I never really saw the late night credit thing as the reason people didn’t want to invest. It was mostly just things usually took a long time to fix/resolve and the payoff was uncertain. It usually took sustained downtime and actual potential loss of customers before maintenance and stability were prioritized and invested in. And maybe that was the right call
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  > I never really saw the late night credit thing as the reason people didn’t want to invest. That's not what I was trying to say. I was trying to say that it's far more noticeable to management that the guy waking up at 3am to fix an outage than the guy who builds resilient infrastructure that never suffers the same outage. One looks like he's "doing" more, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better.

diarrhea 3y ago

One of my long term plans is to do software development in the domain of infrastructure. Think developing Kubernetes itself instead of “just” using it. Now you say that even where that infrastructure was the product, the work was still regarded poorly. That is so sad! How come such a thing can exist? Wouldn’t the business fail in the medium term?

121789 3y ago

I never really saw the late night credit thing as the reason people didn’t want to invest. It was mostly just things usually took a long time to fix/resolve and the payoff was uncertain. It usually took sustained downtime and actual potential loss of customers before maintenance and stability were prioritized and invested in. And maybe that was the right call

JohnMakin 3y ago
> I never really saw the late night credit thing as the reason people didn’t want to invest. That's not what I was trying to say. I was trying to say that it's far more noticeable to management that the guy waking up at 3am to fix an outage than the guy who builds resilient infrastructure that never suffers the same outage. One looks like he's "doing" more, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better.