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I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team. Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel

I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team. Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain. Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain. Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain! The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control. However, I think the author and I have different opinions on what DevOps is. DevOps isn't a full time role. It's what the engineer does to get their software into production.

bobanrocky 8mo ago
The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. Try it once .. is my advice
- jpollock 8mo ago
  I think there are different definitions of DevOps. I see a difference between a more definite operations team (SRE) vs an engineering team having responsibility for how their service works in production (DevOps). DevOps is something that all teams should be doing - there's no point in writing code that spends it's life generating problems for customers or other teams, and having the problems arrive at the owners results in them being properly prioritized. In smaller orgs, DevOps and SRE might be together, but it should still be a rotation instead of a fulltime role, and everyone should be doing it. Engineers who don't do devops write code that looks like: if (should_never_happen) { log.error("owner=wombat@example.com it happened again"); } Where the one who does do devops writes code that avoids the error condition entirely (usually possible), or decides what the code should do in that situation (not log).
- esseph 8mo ago
  > The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. IDK I've been called everything from: SysOp, SysAdmin, Network Engineer, Systems Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Half of those at different companies are just "DevOps" depending on the org.
- rirze 8mo ago
  It truly depends on the type of DevOps experience. I've avoided firefighting DevOps roles my career and I enjoy it. Having the space to step back and design intelligent dependent systems is satisfying.
antonvs 8mo ago
This sounds very adversarial to me. I’m glad our devops team doesn’t think like you.
- jpollock 8mo ago
  In my career, DevOps was never a separate organization. It was a role assumed by the code owners. SRE (is it up, is the hardware working, is the network working?) was separate, and had different metrics. Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with independent goals. Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from another, or is it company-wide?
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  If you have a “DevOps team” - they are operations and you aren’t getting any of the benefits of a DevOps mindset
  - antonvs 8mo ago
    Meh, real life is a bit more complicated than a manifesto.
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      It’s not about just a manifesto, at the startup I worked for before getting into consulting 6 years ago - cloud + app dev - it was much more affective for the team who did the work, to create their own IAC based on a standard. What’s the difference between a “DevOps team” in 2026 than “operations” in 2001?
      - antonvs 8mo ago
        The difference is what they do. Assisting other teams with creating fully automated build and test pipelines. Managing infrastructure using automated systems. Identifying issues in production systems that other teams should look at, down to a level of granularity that wasn’t really possible in 2001. > affective You mean “effective”.

bobanrocky 8mo ago

The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. Try it once .. is my advice

jpollock 8mo ago
I think there are different definitions of DevOps. I see a difference between a more definite operations team (SRE) vs an engineering team having responsibility for how their service works in production (DevOps). DevOps is something that all teams should be doing - there's no point in writing code that spends it's life generating problems for customers or other teams, and having the problems arrive at the owners results in them being properly prioritized. In smaller orgs, DevOps and SRE might be together, but it should still be a rotation instead of a fulltime role, and everyone should be doing it. Engineers who don't do devops write code that looks like: if (should_never_happen) { log.error("owner=wombat@example.com it happened again"); } Where the one who does do devops writes code that avoids the error condition entirely (usually possible), or decides what the code should do in that situation (not log).
esseph 8mo ago
> The only folks who like devops are those that haven’t touched anything else, or are scared to move out of that molehill. IDK I've been called everything from: SysOp, SysAdmin, Network Engineer, Systems Architect, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Half of those at different companies are just "DevOps" depending on the org.
rirze 8mo ago
It truly depends on the type of DevOps experience. I've avoided firefighting DevOps roles my career and I enjoy it. Having the space to step back and design intelligent dependent systems is satisfying.

antonvs 8mo ago

This sounds very adversarial to me. I’m glad our devops team doesn’t think like you.

jpollock 8mo ago
In my career, DevOps was never a separate organization. It was a role assumed by the code owners. SRE (is it up, is the hardware working, is the network working?) was separate, and had different metrics. Having separate teams makes it adversarial because both orgs end up reporting into separate hierarchies with independent goals. Think about the metrics each team is measured on. Who resolves conflicts between them? How high up the org chart is it necessary to go to resolve the conflict? Can one team make different tradeoffs on code quality vs speed from another, or is it company-wide?
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
If you have a “DevOps team” - they are operations and you aren’t getting any of the benefits of a DevOps mindset
- antonvs 8mo ago
  Meh, real life is a bit more complicated than a manifesto.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    It’s not about just a manifesto, at the startup I worked for before getting into consulting 6 years ago - cloud + app dev - it was much more affective for the team who did the work, to create their own IAC based on a standard. What’s the difference between a “DevOps team” in 2026 than “operations” in 2001?
    - antonvs 8mo ago
      The difference is what they do. Assisting other teams with creating fully automated build and test pipelines. Managing infrastructure using automated systems. Identifying issues in production systems that other teams should look at, down to a level of granularity that wasn’t really possible in 2001. > affective You mean “effective”.