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Yes you took the bait! > This was at a 100+ developers organisation. IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organisations than

by worik 3y ago

Yes you took the bait! > This was at a 100+ developers organisation. IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organisations than that. Dev Ops still matters there, and the requirements are different. I am working in an organisation with one and a half developers. I am lobbying that the third of fourth developer concentrates on Dev Ops here. It is very important. Look at the back up/recovery procedures at your organisation. Has there ever been a fire drill? Are you sure the back ups are sound? Can you recover? What if data corruption occurred a week/month ago. Have you a back up of the uncorrupted data? That is a very unsexy aspect of Dev Ops, and without somebody dedicated to the job, your backups will not be any of those things. Bitter. Experience.

znpy 3y ago
> I am working in an organisation with one and a half developers. I am lobbying that the third of fourth developer concentrates on Dev Ops here. not sure you're doing the right thing here. you might want to consider hiring some kind of linux guy that can can do some basic devops. or maybe hire some devops contractor that can work with you on a part-time basis and "curate" some specific aspects of your operations. I've seen this done in the past: so you've got this consultant on retainer, and you tell them something like: "i've got this issue, can we do something about it? our constraints would be x y z" and the consultant would make 1-3 proposals (different approaches, different pricing levels, different ETAs etc) and then you agree on what gets done. The key aspect here is that a good devops consultant can get stuff done very quickly. > It is very important. Look at the back up/recovery procedures at your organisation. Has there ever been a fire drill? Are you sure the back ups are sound? Can you recover? What if data corruption occurred a week/month ago. Have you a back up of the uncorrupted data? Yes (to all questions). I ended up in working in heavily regulated environments. All the things you mentioned were not just niceties, but mandatory by legal requirements. > That is a very unsexy aspect of Dev Ops, and without somebody dedicated to the job, your backups will not be any of those things. That's basic system administration. Most devops engineers are former sysadmins.
jameshart 3y ago
> IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organizations than that I guess it's okay to have an opinion about that, but this seems like something that should probably be a fact. Unfortunately, not sure I can find reliable stats on sizes of engineering organizations. The thing is, while there are obviously lots of small companies, there are also some really big software development organizations out there. A company like Netflix has 2,500 engineers. Microsoft employs over 100,000 engineers. Walmart employs over 15,000 software developers. You need a lot of little 10-50 engineer dev shops to add up to the combined size of the engineering orgs of the Fortune 500. According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/507530/united-states-distribution-it-industry-employment-by-company-size/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/507530/united-states-dis..., at least, 29.4+25.8 = 55.2% of the US "IT Industry" workforce are employed in companies with >100 employees. That's a Long way from telling us about sizes of engineering orgs though. But still... I'd be careful assuming that the vast majority of developers are in organizations of less than 100 people.
- Solvency 3y ago
  How the hell does Walmart need 5x as many developers as Netflix?
  - jameshart 3y ago
    Walmart has 2.3 million employees in total. The only larger employers than them in the world are armies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Why do you assume that only three US landscape is discussed here? Plus I'm not very sure those statistics are reliable. Anecdotal evidence: I have 22 years of career and I've only worked in big organizations twice, for the total of a year. Everything else was much smaller.

by worik 3y ago

znpy 3y ago

> I am working in an organisation with one and a half developers. I am lobbying that the third of fourth developer concentrates on Dev Ops here. not sure you're doing the right thing here. you might want to consider hiring some kind of linux guy that can can do some basic devops. or maybe hire some devops contractor that can work with you on a part-time basis and "curate" some specific aspects of your operations. I've seen this done in the past: so you've got this consultant on retainer, and you tell them something like: "i've got this issue, can we do something about it? our constraints would be x y z" and the consultant would make 1-3 proposals (different approaches, different pricing levels, different ETAs etc) and then you agree on what gets done. The key aspect here is that a good devops consultant can get stuff done very quickly. > It is very important. Look at the back up/recovery procedures at your organisation. Has there ever been a fire drill? Are you sure the back ups are sound? Can you recover? What if data corruption occurred a week/month ago. Have you a back up of the uncorrupted data? Yes (to all questions). I ended up in working in heavily regulated environments. All the things you mentioned were not just niceties, but mandatory by legal requirements. > That is a very unsexy aspect of Dev Ops, and without somebody dedicated to the job, your backups will not be any of those things. That's basic system administration. Most devops engineers are former sysadmins.

jameshart 3y ago

> IMO the vast majority of software development happens in much smaller organizations than that I guess it's okay to have an opinion about that, but this seems like something that should probably be a fact. Unfortunately, not sure I can find reliable stats on sizes of engineering organizations. The thing is, while there are obviously lots of small companies, there are also some really big software development organizations out there. A company like Netflix has 2,500 engineers. Microsoft employs over 100,000 engineers. Walmart employs over 15,000 software developers. You need a lot of little 10-50 engineer dev shops to add up to the combined size of the engineering orgs of the Fortune 500. According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/507530/united-states-distribution-it-industry-employment-by-company-size/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/507530/united-states-dis..., at least, 29.4+25.8 = 55.2% of the US "IT Industry" workforce are employed in companies with >100 employees. That's a Long way from telling us about sizes of engineering orgs though. But still... I'd be careful assuming that the vast majority of developers are in organizations of less than 100 people.

Solvency 3y ago
How the hell does Walmart need 5x as many developers as Netflix?
- jameshart 3y ago
  Walmart has 2.3 million employees in total. The only larger employers than them in the world are armies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
pdimitar 3y ago
Why do you assume that only three US landscape is discussed here? Plus I'm not very sure those statistics are reliable. Anecdotal evidence: I have 22 years of career and I've only worked in big organizations twice, for the total of a year. Everything else was much smaller.