12 ms·

I sometimes wonder about whether the decline in IT worker quality is down to companies trying to force more and more roles onto each worker to reduce headcount.

I sometimes wonder about whether the decline in IT worker quality is down to companies trying to force more and more roles onto each worker to reduce headcount. Developers, Operations, and Security used to be dedicated roles. Then we made DevOps and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 2/3 of the headcount, rather than integrating those teams. Then we made DevSecOps, and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 1/3 the original roles, and that devs could just also be their operations and appsec team. That's not a knock on shift-left and integrated operations models; those are often good ideas. It's just the logical outcome of those models when execs think they can get a bigger bonus by cutting costs by cutting headcounts. Now you have new devs coming into insanely complex n-microservice environments, being asked to learn the existing codebase, being asked to learn their 5-tool CI/CD pipelines (and that ain't being taught in school), being asked to learn to be DBAs, and also to keep up a steady code release cycle. Is anyone really surprised they are using ChatGPT to keep up? This is going to keep happening until IT companies stop cutting headcounts to make line go up (instead of good business strategy).

yifanl 2y ago
They're cutting headcount because they have no conception of how to make a good product, so reducing costs is the only of making the bottom line go up. That's across the board, from the startups whose business plan is to be acquired at all costs, to the giant tech companies, whose business plan is to get monopoly power first, then figure out how to extract money later.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Failures of capitalism that probably need regulation. If the middle class and workers are to be protected.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Would UBI and LVT do the trick? I'm okay with minimum wages on the idea that a democratic government is the biggest possible de facto labor union, but in general I don't want the government making too many rules about how you can hire and fire people
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The city of Seattle decided that gig delivery drivers needed to be protected. They passed a minimum wage for them. The income of gig drivers promptly dropped, as the rise in prices corresponded with a drop in customers. Who regulates the regulators?
    - malfist 2y ago
      You need a citation for that claim. And something more than just "the week after this went into effect it reduced sale volume" And besides, what's the alternative here? Don't protect employees? Let them work below minimum wage?
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        https://mustreadalaska.com/labor-day-cautionary-tale-for-gig-workers-how-seattle-crashed-its-food-delivery-industry/ https://mustreadalaska.com/labor-day-cautionary-tale-for-gig...
        malfist 2y ago
        Leaving aside the relevance of an Alaskan newspaper talking about local Seattle politics, their only source is a news article from Seattle written the week of the law taking effect. As I said in my original comment, show me something that isn't from the first couple of weeks after it took effect. Preferably something scholarly, not just anecdotes from a newspaper
        WalterBright 2y ago
        If you go to news.google.com, and type in "seattle gig worker law" and you'll find plenty of articles about it.
    - djbusby 2y ago
      Why did the prices for Uber/Lyft rise everywhere else too? It wasn't Seattle laws that did that. It's that those companies needed to go from Growth-Mode to Margin-Mode. They could no longer sell VC dollars for dimes.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Yeah this after all. Private corporations exist to make money. They minimize investment and maximize returns. They progressively suppress wages and inflate profits. Clever individual choices and self discounts merely create temporary competitive advantages against other poor laborers in the market. If you manage to secure the bag that way and exit that class altogether, good for you, but that solves nothing for the rest. There's no be all end all threshold that everyone can just stay above and stay ahead of inflation.
  - gruez 2y ago
    What would this mean in practice? Forcing companies to justify layoffs? Mandating minimum amount of people in frontend/backend/devops/operations/security roles?
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > They're cutting headcount because they have no conception of how to make a good product, so reducing costs is the only of making the bottom line go up. The field is wide open for a startup to do it right. Why not start one?
  - malfist 2y ago
    Because the field isn't even. Monopoly or oligopoly power works to prevent new competitors while at the same time stagnating their offerings. Look at the explosion of browsers and their capabilities after the IE monopoly was broken.
  - Buttons840 2y ago
    Well, either (1) our free market is not healthy and the ability to form new companies that do better is weak and feeble, or (2) the current companies are doing about as well as possibe and it is hard to out compete them. If it's the latter (number 2), then we need to start asking why American companies "doing about as well as possible" are incapable of producing secure and reliable software. Being able to produce secure and reliable software, in general and en masse, seems like a useful ability for a nation. Reminds me of our national ability to produce aircraft; how's the competition in that market working out? And are we getting better or worse at producing aircraft?
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Companies deliver what customers are willing to pay for. If customers are willing to pay for X, and no companies make X available, you have a great case to make to a venture capitalist. BTW, in every company I've worked for, the employees thought management was stupid and incompetent. In every company I've run, the employees thought I was stupid and incompetent. Sometimes these people leave and start their own company, and soon discover their employees think they're stupid and incompetent. It's just a fact of life in any organization. It's also a fact of life that anyone starting a business learns an awful lot the hard way. Consider Senator George McGovern (D), who said it best: George McGovern's Mea Culpa "In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn's 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender. Today we are much closer to a general acknowledgment that government must encourage business to expand and grow. Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey and others have, I believe, changed the debate of our party. We intuitively know that to create job opportunities we need entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off those opportunities." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203406404578070543545022704 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203406404578070...
- solidninja 2y ago
  Probably a lot of that is to do with the short-term profit mindset. There is tons of software that is far from optimal, breaks frequently and has a massive impact on human lives (think: medical record systems, mainframes at banks, etc.). None of it is sexy, none of it is something you can knock up a PoC for in a month, and none of it is getting the funding to fix it (instead funding is going to teams of outsourced consultants who overpromise and just increase their budgets year on year). Gen AI won't make this better I think.
jajko 2y ago
So its not going to stop. Typical C-suite who holds real power has absolutely 0 clue about IT complexity, we are overpriced janitors to them. Their fault, their blame, but they are probably long gone when these mistakes manifest fully. In my banking corp, in past 13 years I've seen massive rise of complexity, coupled with absolutely madly done bureaucracy increase. I still could do all stuff that is required but - I dont have access. I cant have access. Simple task became 10 steps negotiating with obscure Pune team that I need to chase 10x and escalate till they actually recognize there is some work for them. Processes became beyond ridiculous, you start something and it could take 2 days or 3 months, who knows. Every single app will break pretty quickly if not constantly maintained - be it some new network stuff, unchecked unix update, or any other of trillion things that can and will go wrong. This means - paper pushers and folks at best average at their primary job (still IT or related) got very entretched in processes and won, and business gets served subpar IT, projects over time and thus budget, perpetuating the image of shitty tolerated evil IT. I stopped caring, work to live is more than enough for me, that 'live' part is where my focus is and life achievements are.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- godelski 2y ago
  - my laundry app (that I must use) takes minutes to load, doesn't cache my last used laundry room, and the list of rooms isn't even fucking sorted (literally: room 3, room 7, room 1, room 2, ...) - my AC's app takes 45 s to load even if I just used it, because it needs to connect. Worse, I'll bring the temp down in my house and in the evening raise it, but it'll come on even when 5F below my target value, staying on for 15+ minutes leaving us freezing (5F according to __it's thermometer__!) - my TV controls are slow. Enough that I buffer inputs and wait 2-3 seconds for the commands to play. That pressing the exit button in the same menu (I turn down brightness at night because auto settings don't work, so it's the exact same behavior), idk if I'm exciting to my input, exiting the menu, or just exiting the sub menu. It's inconsistent! There's so much that I can go on and on and I'm sure you can too. I think one of the worst parts about being a programmer is that I'm pretty sure I know how to solve many of these issues, and in fact sometimes I'll spend days to tear apart the system to actually fix it. Of course to only be undone by updates that are forced (app or whatever won't connect because why is everything done server side ( ┛ ◉ Д ◉ ) ┛ 彡 ┻ ━ ┻ ). Even worse, I'll make PRs on open projects (or open issues another way and submit solutions) that having been working for months and they just go stale while I see other users reporting the same problems and devs working on other things in the same project (I'll even see them deny the behavior or just respond "works for me" closes issue before opener can respond) I don't know how to stop caring because these things directly affect me and are slowing me down. I mean how fucking hard is it to use sort? It's not even one line! What the fuck is wrong with us?
lispisok 2y ago
Like most things the decline in quality is probably multi-faceted. There is also the component where tech became a hot attractive field so people flooded in who only cared about the paycheck and not the craft.
- trashtester 2y ago
  That definitely happend in the dotcom bubble. Plenty of "developers" were crowding the field, many of which neither had any real technical ability or interest. The nerds who were into programming based on personal interest were really not affected. Those who have tech as a passion will generally outpeform those who have it as a job, by a large margin. But salary structures tend to ignore this.
stuckkeys 2y ago
Sadly. It is an onward trend. I have become so discouraged from this subject, that I am evaluating my career choices. Farming is a the safest bet for now.
- stuckinhell 2y ago
  i'm worried this is the case as well
- huuhee3 2y ago
  Nursing is pretty safe too, simply due to demographics and limitations of robotics.
- malfist 2y ago
  Have you actually done farming? I grew up on a farm. It's no where close to a safe bet. It's capital intensive, high risk, hard work with low margins. Not at all like stardew.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    Personal horticulture is fun and rewarding! Grow your own lettuce, tomato, etc. BigAg is HARD WORK
    - malfist 2y ago
      Absolutely. I love having my own garden and growing food for myself and friends. I give away a ton of food with what I grow. I'll never run a farm. Closest thing I might come to is a florist's greenhouse, but that's probably still a no go
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Presumably he means safe with respect to task consolidation, as per the topic of discussion. Which I would agree is more or less true, but only because farming already went through its consolidation phase. Hence the old saying that goes something like: "A farmer has to be a mechanic, an engineer, a scientist, a veterinarian, a business manager, and an optimist—all in a single day." As a farmer, if you think programming, CI/CD pipeline management, and database administration being consolidated into one job is a line too far... Brace yourself!
trashtester 2y ago
They're realizing that 10x (+) developers exist, but think they can hire them at 1x developer salaries. Btw, they key skill you're leaving out, is to understand the business your company is in. If you can couple even moderate developer ability with a good understanding of business objectives, you may stay relevant even while some of the pure developers are replaced by AI.
- swader999 2y ago
  This 100%. It's rare to find anyone that wants to learn a complex biz domain.
  - extr 2y ago
    It's because it's often a suboptimal career move from an individual perspective. By branding yourself as a "FinTech Developer" or whatever instead of just a "Developer" you're narrowing your possible job options for questionable benefit in terms of TC and skills growth. This isn't always the case and of course if you spend 20 years in one domain maybe you can brand yourself as an expert there and pull high $/hr consulting rates for fixing people's problems. Maybe. More likely IMO you end up stagnating. I went through this myself early in my career. I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. Insurance companies don't pay that well and there are a limited number of them. After I got out of that lane and got some name-brand tech experience under my belt, job hunting was much easier and my options opened up. I make a lot more money. And I can always go back if I really want to.
    - trashtester 2y ago
      > I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. If you're an "ML insurance guy" outside of the US, it may be quite lucrative compared to other developers. It's really only in the US (and maybe China) that pure developers are demanding $200k+ salaries. In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary, and if you can provide value directly to the business, it will add a lot to your potential compensation. And in particular, if your skills are more about the business than the tech/math of your domain, you probably want to leverage that, rather than trying to compete with 25-year-olds with a strong STEM background, but poor real-life experience.
nostrademons 2y ago
One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups. I think that what the MBAs miss is this phenomena of overconstraint. Once you have separate the generic role of "developer" into "developer, operations, and security", you've likely specified all sorts of details about how those roles need to be done. When you combine them back into DevSecOps, all the details remain, and you have one person doing 3x the work instead of one person doing the work 3x more efficiently. To effectively go backwards, you have to relax constraints, and let that one person exercise their judgment about how to do the job. A corollary is that org size can never decrease, only increase. As more employees are hired, jobs become increasingly specialized. Getting rid of them means that that job function is simply not performed, because at that level of specialization, the other employees cannot simply adjust their job descriptions to take on the new responsibilities. You have to throw away the old org and start again with a new, small org, which is why the whole private equity / venture capital / startup ecosystem exists. This is also Gall's Law exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  I think there is another bit to this which is cargo cult tendencies. Basically DevOps is a great idea under certain circumstances and works well for specific people in that role. Realistically if you take a top talent engineer they can likely step into any of the three roles or even some others and be successful. Having the synergy of one person being responsible for the boundary between two roles then makes your ROI on that person and that role skyrocket. And then you evangelize this approach and every other company wants to follow suit but they don’t really have top talent in management or engineering or both (every company claims to hire top talent which obviously cannot be true). So they make a poor copy of what the best organizations were doing and obviously it doesn’t go well. And the thing is that they’ve done it before. With Agile and with waterfall before that, etc. There is no methodology (organizational, programming, testing, etc.) that can make excellence out of mediocrity.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    > There is no methodology...that can make excellence out of mediocrity. And yet we keep trying. We continually invent languages, architectures, and development methodologies with the thought that they will help average developers build better systems.
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
ipaddr 2y ago
Developers of the past worked towards the title of webmaster. A webmaster can manage a server, write the code and also be a graphic artist. Developers want to do it all. What has changed is micromanaging of daily standup which reshapes work into neat packages for conversation but kills a non linear flow and limits exploration making things exactly as requested instead of what could be better.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I never thought of a webmaster as meaning that. When I think of webmaster I think of a person who updates the content on a website using a CMS of some sort. Maybe they know a bit of HTML and CSS, how to copy assets to the web server, that sort of thing. But they are not sysadmins or programmers in the conventional sense. Maybe it just varies by employer.
  - llIIllIIllIIl 2y ago
    That’s just a more junior mastery of a true webmaster.
  - ehnto 2y ago
    They were talking about ye olden day I believe. Webmasters used to do every aspect of web development, hosting and all. There are still people who do that at smaller companies, but you wouldn't call them a webmaster anymore.
- chrismarlow9 2y ago
  What has also changed in my opinion is the vast landscape of tooling and frameworks at every level of the stack. We now have containers that run in VMs that run on physical servers. And languages built on top of JavaScript and backed by Shadow Dom and blah blah. Now sure I could easily skip all that and stick a static page on a cdn that points to a lambda and call it a day. But the layers are still there. I'm afraid only more of this is coming with AI in full swing and fully expect a larger scale internet outage to happen at some point that will be the result of a subtle bug in all this complexity that no single person can fix because AI wrote it. There's too much stuff in the stack. Can we stop adding and remove some of it?
khana 2y ago
[dead]
TeMPOraL 2y ago
This is happening across the board, not just to IT workers, and I suspect it's the major factor as for why the expected productivity improvements from technology didn't materialize. Think of your "DevSecOps" people doing 3x the work they should. Do you know what else are they doing? Booking their own business travels. Reconciling and reporting their own expenses. Reporting their own hours, broken down by business categories. Managing their own vacation days. Managing their own meetings. Creating presentations on their own, with graphics they made on their own. Possibly even doing 80% of work on lining up purchases from third parties. And a bunch of other stuff like that. None of these are part of their job descriptions - in fact, all of these are actively distracting and disproportionally compromise the workers' ability to do their actual jobs. All of these also used to have dedicated specialists, that could do it 10x as efficiently, for fraction of the price. My hypothesis is this: those specialists like secretaries, internal graphics departments, financial staff, etc. they all were visible on the balance sheet. Eliminating those roles does not eliminate the need for their work to be done - just distributes it to everyone in pieces (in big part thanks to self-serve office software "improving" productivity). That slows everyone down across the board disproportionally, but the beancounters only see the money saved on salaries of the eliminated roles - the slowdown only manifests as a fuzzy, generic sense of loss of productivity, a mysterious costs disease that everyone seems to suffer from. I say it's not mysterious; I say that there is no productivity gain, but rather productivity loss - but because it turns the costs from legible, overt, into diffuse and hard to count, it's easy to get fooled that money is being saved.
- sgt101 2y ago
  And yet we are told that competition will determine that capital and talent will flow towards that most efficient organisations over time. Thus, surely organisations that eschewed this practice would emerge and dominate? So, either capitalism doesn't work, or your thesis isn't quite right... I have two other counters to offer, first we have seen GDP per capita gradually increasing in major economies for the last 50 years (while the IT revolution has played out). There have been other technical innovations over this time, but I believe that GDP per capita has more than quadrupled in G8 economies. The USA and Canada have, at the same time, enjoyed a clear extra boost from fracking and shale extraction, and the USA has arguably enjoyed an extra extra boost from world dominance - but arguably. The second one is simple anecdote. Hour for hour I now can do far more in terms of development than I did when I was a hard core techie in the 90's and 2000's. In addition I can manage and administer systems that are far more complex than those it took teams of people to run at that time (try running a 10gb size db under load on oracle 7 sitting on top of spinning rust and 64mb ram store for fun) I can also manage a team of 30's expenses, timesheets, travel requests and so on that again would have taken a person to do. I can just do these things and my job as well and I do it mostly in about 50 hrs a week. If I wasn't involved in my people's lives and happy to argue with customers to get things better I could do it in 40 hrs regularally, for sure. But I put some discretion in. My point is - we are just more productive. It is hard to measure, and anecdote / "lived experience" is a bad type of evidence, but I think it's clearly there. This is why then accountants have been able to reorganise modern business organisations to use fewer people to do more. Have they destroyed value while doing this - totally - but they have managed to get away with it because 7/10 they have been right. Personally I've suffered from the 3/10 errors. I know many of us on here have, but we shouldn't shut our eyes because of that.
agumonkey 2y ago
devops is a great idea but if the design/engineering part is not actually easier, it ends up as additional mental effort
rgblambda 2y ago
At my company, our sprint board is copy/pasted across teams, so there's columns like "QA/Testing" that just get ignored because our team has no testers. There's also no platform engineers but IaC has gotten that good that arguably they've become redundant. Architecture decisions get made on the fly by team members rather than by the Software Architect who only shows up now and again to point out something trivial. No Product Owner so again the team work out the requirements and write the tickets (ChatGPT can't help there).
yieldcrv 2y ago
Partially agree It is so much easier to deploy now (and for the last 5-10 years) without managing an actual server and OS It just gets easier, with new complexities added on top In 2014 I was enamored that I didn’t need to be a DBA because platforms as a service were handling all of it in a NoSQL kind of way. And exposed intuitive API endpoints for me. This hasn’t changed, at worst it was a gateway drug to being more hands on I do fullstack development because it’s just one language, I do devops because it’s not a fulltime job and cloud formation scripts and further abstraction is easyish, I can manage the database and I haven’t gotten vendor locked You don’t have to wait 72 hours for DNS and domain assignments to propagate anymore it’s like 5 minutes, SSL is free and takes 30 minutes tops to be added to your domain, CDNs are included. Over 10 years ago this was all so cumbersome
crystal_revenge 2y ago
> whether the decline in IT worker quality I think it entirely has to do with a generation of software people getting into the field (understandably) because it makes them a lot of money, rather than because they're passionate about software. These, by-and-large, are mediocre technical people and they tend to hire other mediocre technical people. When I look around at many of the newer startups that are popping up they're increasing filled with really talented people. I chalk this up largely to the fact that people that really know what they're doing are increasingly necessary to get a company started in a more cash constrained environment and those people are making sure they hire really talented people. Tech right now reminds me so much more of tech around 2004-2008, when almost everyone one that was interested in startups was in it because they loved hacking on technical problems. My experience with Cursor is that it is excellent at doing things mediocre engineers can do, and awful at anything more advanced. It also requires the ability to very quickly understand someone else's code. I could be wrong, but my suspicion is this will allow a lot of very technical engineers, that don't focus on things like front-end or web app development, to forgo needing to hire as many junior webdev people. Similar to how webmasters disappeared once we have frameworks and tools for quickly building the basic HTML/CSS required for a web page.
- bluepizza 2y ago
  While you have a good point, I think the experts also branched off with some unreasonable requirements. I remember reading Yegge's blog post, years ago, saying that an engineer needed to know bitwise operators, otherwise they were not good enough. I don't know. Curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving seem to me much more important criteria for an engineer to have, rather than bitwise operations. An engineer that has these will learn everything needed to get the job done. So it seems like we all got off the main road, and started looking for shibboleths.
  - crystal_revenge 2y ago
    I have a hard time imagining someone who has "curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving" regarding programming and yet hasn't stumbled upon bitwise operators (and then immediately found them interesting). They're pretty fundamental to the craft. I can see having to refresh on various bit shifting techniques for fast multiplication etc (though any serous program should at least be aware of this), but XOR is fundamental to even knowing the basics of cryptography. Bitwise AND, NOT, and OR are certainly something every serious programmer should have a very solid understanding of no?
badpun 2y ago
In every team I've worked with, DevOps didn't do any of the development, while being called DevOps. The only thing they were developing were automation for build, tests and deployment. Other than that, they're still a separate role from development. The main difference between pre-devops days and now, is that operations people used to work in dedicated operations teams (that's still the case in some highly regulated places, e.g. banks), and now they work alongside developers.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I think this is a valid and important point. You can categorize get people who are average at several things devOps. But you will not get someone with a deep background and understanding in all the fields at the same time. I come from a back end background. and I appalled at how little the devOps I have worked with know about even SQL. Having teams with people who are experts at different things will give a lot better output. It will be more expensive. Most devOps I have met, with a couple of exceptions, are front end devs who knows a couple of Javascript, knows Javascript and Typescript. When it comes to the back-end it is getting everything possible form npm and stringing it together.
moi2388 2y ago
From my experience it’s agile/scrum being poorly implemented. So many companies no longer think about quality or design. “Just build this now and ship it, we can modify it later”, not thinking about the ramifications. No thinking about design at all anymore, then having tech debt but not allocating any sprints to mitigate it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  Sometimes it feels like there is no planning... and as a consequence also no documentation. Or maybe there are tons of outdated documentation because the project is so agile that it was redesigned a few dozen times, but instead of updating the original documents and diagrams, the architects always only produced a diff "change this to this", and those diffs are randomly placed in Confluence, most of them as attached Word or PowerPoint documents. "But developers hate to write documentation" they say. Okay genius, so why don't you hire someone who is not a developer, someone who doesn't spend their entire time sprinting from one Jira task to another, someone who could focus on understanding how the systems work and keeping the documents up to date. It would be enough to have one such person for the entire company; just don't also give them dozen extra roles that would distract them from their main purpose. "Once we hired a person like this, but they were not competent for their job and everyone complained about docs, so we gave up." Yeah, I suspect you hired the cheapest person available, and you probably kept giving them extra tasks that were always higher priority than this. But nice excuse. Okay, back to having no idea how anything works, which is not a problem because our agile developers can still somehow handle it, until they burn out and quit.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    What you're asking for is not for the company to hire technical writers but reverse engineers. That's a much harder role to hire as the people who have the skills to do it are the same developers who don't want to do it. Ultimately, mature developers just have to write docs. There's no alternative or lifestyle hack managers can come up with.
skinney6 2y ago
Remember 10x? "Are you a 10x developer?!" lol
ozim 2y ago
For me DevOps/DevSecOps is reaction movement against toxic turf wars and silos of functions from ambitious people - not some business people scheme to reduce headcount and push more responsibilities. I have received e-mails "hey thats DB don't touch that stuff you are not a DBA" or "hey developers shouldn't do QA" while the premise might be right, lots of things could be done much quicker. I have seen throwing stuff over the wall "hey I am a developer, I don't care about some server stuff", "hey my DB is working fine it must be you application" or months of fixing an issue because no one would take the responsibility across the chain.
- elric 2y ago
  > For me DevOps/DevSecOps is reaction movement against toxic turf wars and silos of functions from ambitious people Well the DevOps grandfathers (sorry, Patrick & Kris, but you're both grey now) certainly wanted to tear down the walls that had been put up between Devs & Ops. Merging Dev & Ops practices has been a fundamentally good change. Many tasks that used to be dedicated Ops/Infra work are now so automated that a Dev can do them as part of their daily work (e.g. spinning up a test environment or deploying to production). This has been, in a sense, about empowerement. The current "platform engineering"-buzz builds on top of that. > - not some business people scheme to reduce headcount and push more responsibilities I imagine that many business people don't understand tech work well enough to deliberately start such schemes. Reducing toil could probably result in lower headcount (no one likes being part of a silo that does the same manual things over and over again just to deploy to production), but by the same count the automations don't come free. They have to be set up and maintained. Once one piece of drudgery has been automated, something else will rear its ugly head. Automating the heck out of boring shit is not only more rewarding work, it's also a force multiplier for a team. I hope business people see those benefits and aim for them, instead of the aforementioned scheming.
- ang_cire 2y ago
  Like I said, I have no issue with integrated operations models, but if you try to have one person be a Jack of All Trades, you will end up with them all being 'masters of none'. DevSecOps works very well when you have your coding specialists, operations specialists (including DBAs), and Security specialists all on the same team together, rather than being different silos with different standups and team meetings, etc. But it doesn't work at all well if you just ask the devs to also be Ops and Security, and lay off the rest.
spacecadet 2y ago
This is happening across most industries. My friends in creative fields are experiencing the same "optimizations". I call this the great lie of productivity. The worker (particularly tech workers) have dreamed of reducing their time spent doing "shit jobs" while amplifying their productivity, so that we can spend more time doing what is meaningful to us... In reality businesses sell out to disconnected private equity and chase "growth" just to boost the wealth of the top. Ultimately this has played out as optimizing work force by reducing head count and spreading workers over more roles.
- ang_cire 2y ago
  Yep, it's 100% MBA-bros who don't understand the actual technical foundations of their companies "optimizing" away their specialized knowledge workers. They get stuck in fire-and-hire cycles of boom-and-bust, and tend to slowly degrade into obscurity.
KronisLV 2y ago
> Now you have new devs coming into insanely complex n-microservice environments, being asked to learn the existing codebase, being asked to learn their 5-tool CI/CD pipelines (and that ain't being taught in school), being asked to learn to be DBAs, and also to keep up a steady code release cycle. If fewer people need to undertake more roles, I think the simplest things you can get away with should be chosen, yet for whatever reason that's not what's happening. Need a front end app? Go for the modern equivalent of jQuery/Bootstrap, e.g. something like Vue, Pinia and PrimeVue (you get components out of the box, you can use them, you don't have to build a whole design system, if needed can still do theming). Also simpler than similar setups with Vuex or Redux in React world. Need a back end app? A simple API only project in your stack of choice, whether that's Java with Dropwizard (even simpler than Spring Boot), C# with ASP.NET (reasonably simple out of the box), PHP with Laravel, Ruby with Rails, Python with Flask/Django, Node with Express etc. And not necessarily microservices but monoliths that can still horizontally scale. A boring RESTful API that shuffles JSON over the wire, most of the time you won't need GraphQL or gRPC. Need a database? PostgreSQL is pretty foolproof, MariaDB or even SQLite can also work in select situations. Maybe something like Redis/Valkey or MinIO/SeaweedFS, or RabbitMQ for specific use cases. The kinds of systems that can both scale, as well as start out as a single container running on a VPS somewhere. Need a web server? Nginx exists, Caddy exists, as does Apache2. Need to orchestrate containers? Docker Compose (or even Swarm) still exist, Nomad is pretty good for multi node deployments too, maybe some relatively lightweight Kubernetes clusters like K3s with Portainer/Rancher as long as you don't go wild. CI/CD? Feed a Dockerfile to your pipeline, put the container in Nexus/Artifactory/Harbor/Hub, call a webhook to redeploy, let your monitoring (e.g. Uptime Kuma) make sure things remain available. Architectures that can fit in one person's head. Environments where you can take every part of the system and run it locally in Docker/Podman containers on a single dev workstation. This won't work for huge projects, but very few actually have projects that reach the scale where this no longer works. Yet, this is clearly not what's happening, that puzzles me. If we don't have 20 different job titles involved in a project, then the complexity covered under the "GlassFish app server configuration manager" position shouldn't be there in the first place (once had a project like that, there was supposed to be a person involved who'd configure the app server for the deployments, until people just went with embedded Tomcat inside of deployable containers, that complexity suddenly dissipated).
stogot 2y ago
Anyone that says they are the “devsecops” person is doing it wrong. Companies should still hire for all three roles they just collaborate together. Someone sold that company a mountain of lies

yifanl 2y ago

They're cutting headcount because they have no conception of how to make a good product, so reducing costs is the only of making the bottom line go up. That's across the board, from the startups whose business plan is to be acquired at all costs, to the giant tech companies, whose business plan is to get monopoly power first, then figure out how to extract money later.

goatlover 2y ago
Failures of capitalism that probably need regulation. If the middle class and workers are to be protected.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Would UBI and LVT do the trick? I'm okay with minimum wages on the idea that a democratic government is the biggest possible de facto labor union, but in general I don't want the government making too many rules about how you can hire and fire people
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The city of Seattle decided that gig delivery drivers needed to be protected. They passed a minimum wage for them. The income of gig drivers promptly dropped, as the rise in prices corresponded with a drop in customers. Who regulates the regulators?
  - malfist 2y ago
    You need a citation for that claim. And something more than just "the week after this went into effect it reduced sale volume" And besides, what's the alternative here? Don't protect employees? Let them work below minimum wage?
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      https://mustreadalaska.com/labor-day-cautionary-tale-for-gig-workers-how-seattle-crashed-its-food-delivery-industry/ https://mustreadalaska.com/labor-day-cautionary-tale-for-gig...
      - malfist 2y ago
        Leaving aside the relevance of an Alaskan newspaper talking about local Seattle politics, their only source is a news article from Seattle written the week of the law taking effect. As I said in my original comment, show me something that isn't from the first couple of weeks after it took effect. Preferably something scholarly, not just anecdotes from a newspaper
        WalterBright 2y ago
        If you go to news.google.com, and type in "seattle gig worker law" and you'll find plenty of articles about it.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    Why did the prices for Uber/Lyft rise everywhere else too? It wasn't Seattle laws that did that. It's that those companies needed to go from Growth-Mode to Margin-Mode. They could no longer sell VC dollars for dimes.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Yeah this after all. Private corporations exist to make money. They minimize investment and maximize returns. They progressively suppress wages and inflate profits. Clever individual choices and self discounts merely create temporary competitive advantages against other poor laborers in the market. If you manage to secure the bag that way and exit that class altogether, good for you, but that solves nothing for the rest. There's no be all end all threshold that everyone can just stay above and stay ahead of inflation.
- gruez 2y ago
  What would this mean in practice? Forcing companies to justify layoffs? Mandating minimum amount of people in frontend/backend/devops/operations/security roles?
WalterBright 2y ago
> They're cutting headcount because they have no conception of how to make a good product, so reducing costs is the only of making the bottom line go up. The field is wide open for a startup to do it right. Why not start one?
- malfist 2y ago
  Because the field isn't even. Monopoly or oligopoly power works to prevent new competitors while at the same time stagnating their offerings. Look at the explosion of browsers and their capabilities after the IE monopoly was broken.
- Buttons840 2y ago
  Well, either (1) our free market is not healthy and the ability to form new companies that do better is weak and feeble, or (2) the current companies are doing about as well as possibe and it is hard to out compete them. If it's the latter (number 2), then we need to start asking why American companies "doing about as well as possible" are incapable of producing secure and reliable software. Being able to produce secure and reliable software, in general and en masse, seems like a useful ability for a nation. Reminds me of our national ability to produce aircraft; how's the competition in that market working out? And are we getting better or worse at producing aircraft?
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Companies deliver what customers are willing to pay for. If customers are willing to pay for X, and no companies make X available, you have a great case to make to a venture capitalist. BTW, in every company I've worked for, the employees thought management was stupid and incompetent. In every company I've run, the employees thought I was stupid and incompetent. Sometimes these people leave and start their own company, and soon discover their employees think they're stupid and incompetent. It's just a fact of life in any organization. It's also a fact of life that anyone starting a business learns an awful lot the hard way. Consider Senator George McGovern (D), who said it best: George McGovern's Mea Culpa "In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn's 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender. Today we are much closer to a general acknowledgment that government must encourage business to expand and grow. Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey and others have, I believe, changed the debate of our party. We intuitively know that to create job opportunities we need entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off those opportunities." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203406404578070543545022704 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203406404578070...
solidninja 2y ago
Probably a lot of that is to do with the short-term profit mindset. There is tons of software that is far from optimal, breaks frequently and has a massive impact on human lives (think: medical record systems, mainframes at banks, etc.). None of it is sexy, none of it is something you can knock up a PoC for in a month, and none of it is getting the funding to fix it (instead funding is going to teams of outsourced consultants who overpromise and just increase their budgets year on year). Gen AI won't make this better I think.

jajko 2y ago

So its not going to stop. Typical C-suite who holds real power has absolutely 0 clue about IT complexity, we are overpriced janitors to them. Their fault, their blame, but they are probably long gone when these mistakes manifest fully. In my banking corp, in past 13 years I've seen massive rise of complexity, coupled with absolutely madly done bureaucracy increase. I still could do all stuff that is required but - I dont have access. I cant have access. Simple task became 10 steps negotiating with obscure Pune team that I need to chase 10x and escalate till they actually recognize there is some work for them. Processes became beyond ridiculous, you start something and it could take 2 days or 3 months, who knows. Every single app will break pretty quickly if not constantly maintained - be it some new network stuff, unchecked unix update, or any other of trillion things that can and will go wrong. This means - paper pushers and folks at best average at their primary job (still IT or related) got very entretched in processes and won, and business gets served subpar IT, projects over time and thus budget, perpetuating the image of shitty tolerated evil IT. I stopped caring, work to live is more than enough for me, that 'live' part is where my focus is and life achievements are.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
godelski 2y ago
- my laundry app (that I must use) takes minutes to load, doesn't cache my last used laundry room, and the list of rooms isn't even fucking sorted (literally: room 3, room 7, room 1, room 2, ...) - my AC's app takes 45 s to load even if I just used it, because it needs to connect. Worse, I'll bring the temp down in my house and in the evening raise it, but it'll come on even when 5F below my target value, staying on for 15+ minutes leaving us freezing (5F according to __it's thermometer__!) - my TV controls are slow. Enough that I buffer inputs and wait 2-3 seconds for the commands to play. That pressing the exit button in the same menu (I turn down brightness at night because auto settings don't work, so it's the exact same behavior), idk if I'm exciting to my input, exiting the menu, or just exiting the sub menu. It's inconsistent! There's so much that I can go on and on and I'm sure you can too. I think one of the worst parts about being a programmer is that I'm pretty sure I know how to solve many of these issues, and in fact sometimes I'll spend days to tear apart the system to actually fix it. Of course to only be undone by updates that are forced (app or whatever won't connect because why is everything done server side ( ┛ ◉ Д ◉ ) ┛ 彡 ┻ ━ ┻ ). Even worse, I'll make PRs on open projects (or open issues another way and submit solutions) that having been working for months and they just go stale while I see other users reporting the same problems and devs working on other things in the same project (I'll even see them deny the behavior or just respond "works for me" closes issue before opener can respond) I don't know how to stop caring because these things directly affect me and are slowing me down. I mean how fucking hard is it to use sort? It's not even one line! What the fuck is wrong with us?

lispisok 2y ago

Like most things the decline in quality is probably multi-faceted. There is also the component where tech became a hot attractive field so people flooded in who only cared about the paycheck and not the craft.

trashtester 2y ago
That definitely happend in the dotcom bubble. Plenty of "developers" were crowding the field, many of which neither had any real technical ability or interest. The nerds who were into programming based on personal interest were really not affected. Those who have tech as a passion will generally outpeform those who have it as a job, by a large margin. But salary structures tend to ignore this.

stuckkeys 2y ago

Sadly. It is an onward trend. I have become so discouraged from this subject, that I am evaluating my career choices. Farming is a the safest bet for now.

stuckinhell 2y ago
i'm worried this is the case as well
huuhee3 2y ago
Nursing is pretty safe too, simply due to demographics and limitations of robotics.
malfist 2y ago
Have you actually done farming? I grew up on a farm. It's no where close to a safe bet. It's capital intensive, high risk, hard work with low margins. Not at all like stardew.
- djbusby 2y ago
  Personal horticulture is fun and rewarding! Grow your own lettuce, tomato, etc. BigAg is HARD WORK
  - malfist 2y ago
    Absolutely. I love having my own garden and growing food for myself and friends. I give away a ton of food with what I grow. I'll never run a farm. Closest thing I might come to is a florist's greenhouse, but that's probably still a no go
- randomdata 2y ago
  Presumably he means safe with respect to task consolidation, as per the topic of discussion. Which I would agree is more or less true, but only because farming already went through its consolidation phase. Hence the old saying that goes something like: "A farmer has to be a mechanic, an engineer, a scientist, a veterinarian, a business manager, and an optimist—all in a single day." As a farmer, if you think programming, CI/CD pipeline management, and database administration being consolidated into one job is a line too far... Brace yourself!

trashtester 2y ago

They're realizing that 10x (+) developers exist, but think they can hire them at 1x developer salaries. Btw, they key skill you're leaving out, is to understand the business your company is in. If you can couple even moderate developer ability with a good understanding of business objectives, you may stay relevant even while some of the pure developers are replaced by AI.

swader999 2y ago
This 100%. It's rare to find anyone that wants to learn a complex biz domain.
- extr 2y ago
  It's because it's often a suboptimal career move from an individual perspective. By branding yourself as a "FinTech Developer" or whatever instead of just a "Developer" you're narrowing your possible job options for questionable benefit in terms of TC and skills growth. This isn't always the case and of course if you spend 20 years in one domain maybe you can brand yourself as an expert there and pull high $/hr consulting rates for fixing people's problems. Maybe. More likely IMO you end up stagnating. I went through this myself early in my career. I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. Insurance companies don't pay that well and there are a limited number of them. After I got out of that lane and got some name-brand tech experience under my belt, job hunting was much easier and my options opened up. I make a lot more money. And I can always go back if I really want to.
  - trashtester 2y ago
    > I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. If you're an "ML insurance guy" outside of the US, it may be quite lucrative compared to other developers. It's really only in the US (and maybe China) that pure developers are demanding $200k+ salaries. In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary, and if you can provide value directly to the business, it will add a lot to your potential compensation. And in particular, if your skills are more about the business than the tech/math of your domain, you probably want to leverage that, rather than trying to compete with 25-year-olds with a strong STEM background, but poor real-life experience.

nostrademons 2y ago

One person can do the work of 3 and regularly does in startups. I think that what the MBAs miss is this phenomena of overconstraint. Once you have separate the generic role of "developer" into "developer, operations, and security", you've likely specified all sorts of details about how those roles need to be done. When you combine them back into DevSecOps, all the details remain, and you have one person doing 3x the work instead of one person doing the work 3x more efficiently. To effectively go backwards, you have to relax constraints, and let that one person exercise their judgment about how to do the job. A corollary is that org size can never decrease, only increase. As more employees are hired, jobs become increasingly specialized. Getting rid of them means that that job function is simply not performed, because at that level of specialization, the other employees cannot simply adjust their job descriptions to take on the new responsibilities. You have to throw away the old org and start again with a new, small org, which is why the whole private equity / venture capital / startup ecosystem exists. This is also Gall's Law exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law

IgorPartola 2y ago
I think there is another bit to this which is cargo cult tendencies. Basically DevOps is a great idea under certain circumstances and works well for specific people in that role. Realistically if you take a top talent engineer they can likely step into any of the three roles or even some others and be successful. Having the synergy of one person being responsible for the boundary between two roles then makes your ROI on that person and that role skyrocket. And then you evangelize this approach and every other company wants to follow suit but they don’t really have top talent in management or engineering or both (every company claims to hire top talent which obviously cannot be true). So they make a poor copy of what the best organizations were doing and obviously it doesn’t go well. And the thing is that they’ve done it before. With Agile and with waterfall before that, etc. There is no methodology (organizational, programming, testing, etc.) that can make excellence out of mediocrity.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  > There is no methodology...that can make excellence out of mediocrity. And yet we keep trying. We continually invent languages, architectures, and development methodologies with the thought that they will help average developers build better systems.

wetpaws 2y ago

[dead]

ipaddr 2y ago

Developers of the past worked towards the title of webmaster. A webmaster can manage a server, write the code and also be a graphic artist. Developers want to do it all. What has changed is micromanaging of daily standup which reshapes work into neat packages for conversation but kills a non linear flow and limits exploration making things exactly as requested instead of what could be better.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I never thought of a webmaster as meaning that. When I think of webmaster I think of a person who updates the content on a website using a CMS of some sort. Maybe they know a bit of HTML and CSS, how to copy assets to the web server, that sort of thing. But they are not sysadmins or programmers in the conventional sense. Maybe it just varies by employer.
- llIIllIIllIIl 2y ago
  That’s just a more junior mastery of a true webmaster.
- ehnto 2y ago
  They were talking about ye olden day I believe. Webmasters used to do every aspect of web development, hosting and all. There are still people who do that at smaller companies, but you wouldn't call them a webmaster anymore.
chrismarlow9 2y ago
What has also changed in my opinion is the vast landscape of tooling and frameworks at every level of the stack. We now have containers that run in VMs that run on physical servers. And languages built on top of JavaScript and backed by Shadow Dom and blah blah. Now sure I could easily skip all that and stick a static page on a cdn that points to a lambda and call it a day. But the layers are still there. I'm afraid only more of this is coming with AI in full swing and fully expect a larger scale internet outage to happen at some point that will be the result of a subtle bug in all this complexity that no single person can fix because AI wrote it. There's too much stuff in the stack. Can we stop adding and remove some of it?

khana 2y ago

[dead]

TeMPOraL 2y ago

This is happening across the board, not just to IT workers, and I suspect it's the major factor as for why the expected productivity improvements from technology didn't materialize. Think of your "DevSecOps" people doing 3x the work they should. Do you know what else are they doing? Booking their own business travels. Reconciling and reporting their own expenses. Reporting their own hours, broken down by business categories. Managing their own vacation days. Managing their own meetings. Creating presentations on their own, with graphics they made on their own. Possibly even doing 80% of work on lining up purchases from third parties. And a bunch of other stuff like that. None of these are part of their job descriptions - in fact, all of these are actively distracting and disproportionally compromise the workers' ability to do their actual jobs. All of these also used to have dedicated specialists, that could do it 10x as efficiently, for fraction of the price. My hypothesis is this: those specialists like secretaries, internal graphics departments, financial staff, etc. they all were visible on the balance sheet. Eliminating those roles does not eliminate the need for their work to be done - just distributes it to everyone in pieces (in big part thanks to self-serve office software "improving" productivity). That slows everyone down across the board disproportionally, but the beancounters only see the money saved on salaries of the eliminated roles - the slowdown only manifests as a fuzzy, generic sense of loss of productivity, a mysterious costs disease that everyone seems to suffer from. I say it's not mysterious; I say that there is no productivity gain, but rather productivity loss - but because it turns the costs from legible, overt, into diffuse and hard to count, it's easy to get fooled that money is being saved.

sgt101 2y ago
And yet we are told that competition will determine that capital and talent will flow towards that most efficient organisations over time. Thus, surely organisations that eschewed this practice would emerge and dominate? So, either capitalism doesn't work, or your thesis isn't quite right... I have two other counters to offer, first we have seen GDP per capita gradually increasing in major economies for the last 50 years (while the IT revolution has played out). There have been other technical innovations over this time, but I believe that GDP per capita has more than quadrupled in G8 economies. The USA and Canada have, at the same time, enjoyed a clear extra boost from fracking and shale extraction, and the USA has arguably enjoyed an extra extra boost from world dominance - but arguably. The second one is simple anecdote. Hour for hour I now can do far more in terms of development than I did when I was a hard core techie in the 90's and 2000's. In addition I can manage and administer systems that are far more complex than those it took teams of people to run at that time (try running a 10gb size db under load on oracle 7 sitting on top of spinning rust and 64mb ram store for fun) I can also manage a team of 30's expenses, timesheets, travel requests and so on that again would have taken a person to do. I can just do these things and my job as well and I do it mostly in about 50 hrs a week. If I wasn't involved in my people's lives and happy to argue with customers to get things better I could do it in 40 hrs regularally, for sure. But I put some discretion in. My point is - we are just more productive. It is hard to measure, and anecdote / "lived experience" is a bad type of evidence, but I think it's clearly there. This is why then accountants have been able to reorganise modern business organisations to use fewer people to do more. Have they destroyed value while doing this - totally - but they have managed to get away with it because 7/10 they have been right. Personally I've suffered from the 3/10 errors. I know many of us on here have, but we shouldn't shut our eyes because of that.

agumonkey 2y ago

devops is a great idea but if the design/engineering part is not actually easier, it ends up as additional mental effort

rgblambda 2y ago

At my company, our sprint board is copy/pasted across teams, so there's columns like "QA/Testing" that just get ignored because our team has no testers. There's also no platform engineers but IaC has gotten that good that arguably they've become redundant. Architecture decisions get made on the fly by team members rather than by the Software Architect who only shows up now and again to point out something trivial. No Product Owner so again the team work out the requirements and write the tickets (ChatGPT can't help there).

yieldcrv 2y ago

Partially agree It is so much easier to deploy now (and for the last 5-10 years) without managing an actual server and OS It just gets easier, with new complexities added on top In 2014 I was enamored that I didn’t need to be a DBA because platforms as a service were handling all of it in a NoSQL kind of way. And exposed intuitive API endpoints for me. This hasn’t changed, at worst it was a gateway drug to being more hands on I do fullstack development because it’s just one language, I do devops because it’s not a fulltime job and cloud formation scripts and further abstraction is easyish, I can manage the database and I haven’t gotten vendor locked You don’t have to wait 72 hours for DNS and domain assignments to propagate anymore it’s like 5 minutes, SSL is free and takes 30 minutes tops to be added to your domain, CDNs are included. Over 10 years ago this was all so cumbersome

crystal_revenge 2y ago

> whether the decline in IT worker quality I think it entirely has to do with a generation of software people getting into the field (understandably) because it makes them a lot of money, rather than because they're passionate about software. These, by-and-large, are mediocre technical people and they tend to hire other mediocre technical people. When I look around at many of the newer startups that are popping up they're increasing filled with really talented people. I chalk this up largely to the fact that people that really know what they're doing are increasingly necessary to get a company started in a more cash constrained environment and those people are making sure they hire really talented people. Tech right now reminds me so much more of tech around 2004-2008, when almost everyone one that was interested in startups was in it because they loved hacking on technical problems. My experience with Cursor is that it is excellent at doing things mediocre engineers can do, and awful at anything more advanced. It also requires the ability to very quickly understand someone else's code. I could be wrong, but my suspicion is this will allow a lot of very technical engineers, that don't focus on things like front-end or web app development, to forgo needing to hire as many junior webdev people. Similar to how webmasters disappeared once we have frameworks and tools for quickly building the basic HTML/CSS required for a web page.

bluepizza 2y ago
While you have a good point, I think the experts also branched off with some unreasonable requirements. I remember reading Yegge's blog post, years ago, saying that an engineer needed to know bitwise operators, otherwise they were not good enough. I don't know. Curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving seem to me much more important criteria for an engineer to have, rather than bitwise operations. An engineer that has these will learn everything needed to get the job done. So it seems like we all got off the main road, and started looking for shibboleths.
- crystal_revenge 2y ago
  I have a hard time imagining someone who has "curiosity, passion, focus, creative problem solving" regarding programming and yet hasn't stumbled upon bitwise operators (and then immediately found them interesting). They're pretty fundamental to the craft. I can see having to refresh on various bit shifting techniques for fast multiplication etc (though any serous program should at least be aware of this), but XOR is fundamental to even knowing the basics of cryptography. Bitwise AND, NOT, and OR are certainly something every serious programmer should have a very solid understanding of no?

badpun 2y ago

In every team I've worked with, DevOps didn't do any of the development, while being called DevOps. The only thing they were developing were automation for build, tests and deployment. Other than that, they're still a separate role from development. The main difference between pre-devops days and now, is that operations people used to work in dedicated operations teams (that's still the case in some highly regulated places, e.g. banks), and now they work alongside developers.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I think this is a valid and important point. You can categorize get people who are average at several things devOps. But you will not get someone with a deep background and understanding in all the fields at the same time. I come from a back end background. and I appalled at how little the devOps I have worked with know about even SQL. Having teams with people who are experts at different things will give a lot better output. It will be more expensive. Most devOps I have met, with a couple of exceptions, are front end devs who knows a couple of Javascript, knows Javascript and Typescript. When it comes to the back-end it is getting everything possible form npm and stringing it together.

moi2388 2y ago

From my experience it’s agile/scrum being poorly implemented. So many companies no longer think about quality or design. “Just build this now and ship it, we can modify it later”, not thinking about the ramifications. No thinking about design at all anymore, then having tech debt but not allocating any sprints to mitigate it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Viliam1234 2y ago
Sometimes it feels like there is no planning... and as a consequence also no documentation. Or maybe there are tons of outdated documentation because the project is so agile that it was redesigned a few dozen times, but instead of updating the original documents and diagrams, the architects always only produced a diff "change this to this", and those diffs are randomly placed in Confluence, most of them as attached Word or PowerPoint documents. "But developers hate to write documentation" they say. Okay genius, so why don't you hire someone who is not a developer, someone who doesn't spend their entire time sprinting from one Jira task to another, someone who could focus on understanding how the systems work and keeping the documents up to date. It would be enough to have one such person for the entire company; just don't also give them dozen extra roles that would distract them from their main purpose. "Once we hired a person like this, but they were not competent for their job and everyone complained about docs, so we gave up." Yeah, I suspect you hired the cheapest person available, and you probably kept giving them extra tasks that were always higher priority than this. But nice excuse. Okay, back to having no idea how anything works, which is not a problem because our agile developers can still somehow handle it, until they burn out and quit.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  What you're asking for is not for the company to hire technical writers but reverse engineers. That's a much harder role to hire as the people who have the skills to do it are the same developers who don't want to do it. Ultimately, mature developers just have to write docs. There's no alternative or lifestyle hack managers can come up with.

skinney6 2y ago

Remember 10x? "Are you a 10x developer?!" lol

ozim 2y ago

For me DevOps/DevSecOps is reaction movement against toxic turf wars and silos of functions from ambitious people - not some business people scheme to reduce headcount and push more responsibilities. I have received e-mails "hey thats DB don't touch that stuff you are not a DBA" or "hey developers shouldn't do QA" while the premise might be right, lots of things could be done much quicker. I have seen throwing stuff over the wall "hey I am a developer, I don't care about some server stuff", "hey my DB is working fine it must be you application" or months of fixing an issue because no one would take the responsibility across the chain.

elric 2y ago
> For me DevOps/DevSecOps is reaction movement against toxic turf wars and silos of functions from ambitious people Well the DevOps grandfathers (sorry, Patrick & Kris, but you're both grey now) certainly wanted to tear down the walls that had been put up between Devs & Ops. Merging Dev & Ops practices has been a fundamentally good change. Many tasks that used to be dedicated Ops/Infra work are now so automated that a Dev can do them as part of their daily work (e.g. spinning up a test environment or deploying to production). This has been, in a sense, about empowerement. The current "platform engineering"-buzz builds on top of that. > - not some business people scheme to reduce headcount and push more responsibilities I imagine that many business people don't understand tech work well enough to deliberately start such schemes. Reducing toil could probably result in lower headcount (no one likes being part of a silo that does the same manual things over and over again just to deploy to production), but by the same count the automations don't come free. They have to be set up and maintained. Once one piece of drudgery has been automated, something else will rear its ugly head. Automating the heck out of boring shit is not only more rewarding work, it's also a force multiplier for a team. I hope business people see those benefits and aim for them, instead of the aforementioned scheming.
ang_cire 2y ago
Like I said, I have no issue with integrated operations models, but if you try to have one person be a Jack of All Trades, you will end up with them all being 'masters of none'. DevSecOps works very well when you have your coding specialists, operations specialists (including DBAs), and Security specialists all on the same team together, rather than being different silos with different standups and team meetings, etc. But it doesn't work at all well if you just ask the devs to also be Ops and Security, and lay off the rest.

spacecadet 2y ago

This is happening across most industries. My friends in creative fields are experiencing the same "optimizations". I call this the great lie of productivity. The worker (particularly tech workers) have dreamed of reducing their time spent doing "shit jobs" while amplifying their productivity, so that we can spend more time doing what is meaningful to us... In reality businesses sell out to disconnected private equity and chase "growth" just to boost the wealth of the top. Ultimately this has played out as optimizing work force by reducing head count and spreading workers over more roles.

ang_cire 2y ago
Yep, it's 100% MBA-bros who don't understand the actual technical foundations of their companies "optimizing" away their specialized knowledge workers. They get stuck in fire-and-hire cycles of boom-and-bust, and tend to slowly degrade into obscurity.

KronisLV 2y ago

> Now you have new devs coming into insanely complex n-microservice environments, being asked to learn the existing codebase, being asked to learn their 5-tool CI/CD pipelines (and that ain't being taught in school), being asked to learn to be DBAs, and also to keep up a steady code release cycle. If fewer people need to undertake more roles, I think the simplest things you can get away with should be chosen, yet for whatever reason that's not what's happening. Need a front end app? Go for the modern equivalent of jQuery/Bootstrap, e.g. something like Vue, Pinia and PrimeVue (you get components out of the box, you can use them, you don't have to build a whole design system, if needed can still do theming). Also simpler than similar setups with Vuex or Redux in React world. Need a back end app? A simple API only project in your stack of choice, whether that's Java with Dropwizard (even simpler than Spring Boot), C# with ASP.NET (reasonably simple out of the box), PHP with Laravel, Ruby with Rails, Python with Flask/Django, Node with Express etc. And not necessarily microservices but monoliths that can still horizontally scale. A boring RESTful API that shuffles JSON over the wire, most of the time you won't need GraphQL or gRPC. Need a database? PostgreSQL is pretty foolproof, MariaDB or even SQLite can also work in select situations. Maybe something like Redis/Valkey or MinIO/SeaweedFS, or RabbitMQ for specific use cases. The kinds of systems that can both scale, as well as start out as a single container running on a VPS somewhere. Need a web server? Nginx exists, Caddy exists, as does Apache2. Need to orchestrate containers? Docker Compose (or even Swarm) still exist, Nomad is pretty good for multi node deployments too, maybe some relatively lightweight Kubernetes clusters like K3s with Portainer/Rancher as long as you don't go wild. CI/CD? Feed a Dockerfile to your pipeline, put the container in Nexus/Artifactory/Harbor/Hub, call a webhook to redeploy, let your monitoring (e.g. Uptime Kuma) make sure things remain available. Architectures that can fit in one person's head. Environments where you can take every part of the system and run it locally in Docker/Podman containers on a single dev workstation. This won't work for huge projects, but very few actually have projects that reach the scale where this no longer works. Yet, this is clearly not what's happening, that puzzles me. If we don't have 20 different job titles involved in a project, then the complexity covered under the "GlassFish app server configuration manager" position shouldn't be there in the first place (once had a project like that, there was supposed to be a person involved who'd configure the app server for the deployments, until people just went with embedded Tomcat inside of deployable containers, that complexity suddenly dissipated).

stogot 2y ago

Anyone that says they are the “devsecops” person is doing it wrong. Companies should still hire for all three roles they just collaborate together. Someone sold that company a mountain of lies