24 ms·

The First Rule of DevOps Club

76 points by johnwards 12y ago

jtchang 12y ago
Here is a link to the actual graph she has on her blog: http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/ The important thing we as a community need to understand is that there are terms that can be very gender specific and at the same time being gender neutral depending on the context.
- eterm 12y ago
  Mostly that just seems to show that "guys" (plural) is taken as mostly neutral but "guy" (singular) is not.
  - djur 12y ago
    That seems accurate to me. I do try to avoid 'guys' and 'dudes' in professional contexts, for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but it can be difficult to remember. Most of my closest friends are women, and 'hey guys' and 'hey dudes' are common greetings even when the group is all women (other than me). I don't usually address individuals by anything other than their name, but 'dude' is occasionally used for either a man or a woman, while 'guy' in the singular is clearly only for men. I mean, 'guy' is male-identified to the point that it's used as an indicator -- "guy stuff" versus "girl stuff", etc. It's not a huge stretch to perceive the plural as only quasi-neutral, addressing women by assumption rather than by explicit inclusion.
Squab 12y ago
Anything it takes to get more women in these type of fields is a good idea, imo. There's a slight perspective difference that I find really beneficial when working with women in tech. Besides the other obvious benefits.
Ronsenshi 12y ago
I was expecting something more on topic. First rule of the Fight Club is: > You do not talk about Fight Club Kind of expected something along those lines with more emphasis on the actual DevOps instead of meta talk about community. Still, interesting read.
- Agathos 12y ago
  The first rule of devops club is welcome to devops club. The second rule of devops club is welcome to devops club! The third rule of devops club: someone yells stop, goes limp, tests don't pass: the deployment is over. Roll back to your last known good Docker environment. Fourth rule: only two gu^H^H devops professionals to a deployment. Fifth rule: one deployment at a time. Sixth rule: no bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production. Seventh rule: deployments will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first night at devops club, you have to push something into production. (Some of these are more practical than others, I'll admit. Please don't practice rule 8, and I'm not sure what rule 7 even means.)
  - VLM 12y ago
    Sixth rule: suggesting bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production results in the "burning lye" scene. And the on topic first rule, if you've ever read the book, is the first rule of devops guys is don't talk about devops "guys" in the presence of someone of the female persuasion.
    - Ronsenshi 12y ago
      Or maybe simplify: "You do not talk about DevOps guys"?
  - vacri 12y ago
    Rule 5 is something that should be mentioned more often as a best practise when dealing with production: do one thing at a time. If you're doing several things at once, it's easy to miss an important step. Not so much a problem outside of production, but in production it can be quite harmful.
yeukhon 12y ago
> As for those conversations I had at devopsdays with the folks who thought they were “just” not devops enough? As a junior, my vision of devops is someone who is guarding staging and production, and release management, assuming you have a mature self-service platform for developers. As for why people feel they are not devops enough I think it is important to realize that devops is mainly a culture change (quoting from a coworker). Your devops can be your system admin. Your developers should know how to handle some operations, because they will have to work with the SRE/devops. There should be a structure, a list of runbooks and procedures in place. Automation is only a syntactic sugar of blueprints, documentations, plans (recovery, backup, SLA, etc). DevOps should be the people that say NO to developer and NO to business and NO to upper management when you know something won't go well (e.g. there is a strict release/deployment requirements). So a mature DevOps team is essentially jack-of-all-trade go-to team. You write a lot, you talk a lot, you plan a lot, you maintain a lot, and you innovate a lot (looking at the big picture). Whether you are running a startup or an enterprise, automation is the last thing on your to-do list. To claify my last point: sure you should build your VPC and security groups using cloudformation if you are on AWS. But before doing that, you obviously need to start off with a discussion.
drobertduke 12y ago
Great article. I think part of the difficultly with the word "guys" in particular is that it depends on the usage. Saying "hey guys" or "you guys" when referring to mixed company is generally interpreted as gender neutral. But talking about "ops guys" or "a guy" is definitely not gender neutral.
- ealexhudson 12y ago
  Brilliant article; I've caught myself making the same mistake many times even though I try hard to avoid it. I do think that saying "hey guys" (or similar) is the gateway drug - I find myself making the mistake much less often when I consciously attempt to erase all gender-associated terms. You can say "Hey people" or "Hey team", and get the same effect.
  - vegedor 12y ago
    But, but team is not a personallity neutral term. How about just "Hey"? Short and precise. If talking to a single person, use "Ey" instead
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    The problem is that both of those have connotations that "Hey guys" doesn't. There isn't a good mixed company informal term.
- gaius 12y ago
  "Guy" and "dude" are definitely gender-nonspecific these days, and I don't mean just in tech. When those tapes of Tiger Woods were leaked, he called his mistresses "dude". Language has evolved.
  - skywhopper 12y ago
    Regardless of what you think about it, plenty of people disagree. As a plural, sure "guys" can generally mean a mixed group, but as a singular noun used in a generic sense (eg, "we need a devops guy"), I challenge you to find any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman. In a professional setting, it's important to use language carefully. And in a situation like this where you have evidence that at least some people feel using "guy" and "guys" is a poor choice, and where there are plenty of equivalent alternatives ("folks" is my go-to), the only reason to use "guy" is to be a jerk. Don't be a jerk.
VLM 12y ago
"of whom perhaps 98% were guys" In my extensive non-coastal observation of ops centers, mostly at very large companies, the male-female ratio in ops is much more "normal" than the dev group ratio (which is often all male). Then again I've never worked with anyone who would go to a ops-conference (what do you guys talk about?). This may result in some audience bias, if the audience at a con is entirely mid/upper mgmt (probably all male), or marketing people and startup founders trying to sell stuff to ops mgmt. She might be seeing a mgmt glass ceiling and thinking it has something to do with ops at the bottom of the pyramid. I have observed that the more competently run the ops dept (procedures, decent mgmt, staffing by butts on seats 24x7 instead of on call) the more likely you'll see women working there. I worked at a huge telco that had an all female fiber ops center during 3rd shift some part of the week, for example. Its not too far fetched that a good indication you have professional adults running a place instead of kids, is having female ops team members. Counting them is probably not the dumbest possible metric for a quick eval of a company.
soyiuz 12y ago
I started using "folks" much more for this reason. It is just as folksy as "guys" but more inclusive. Thanks, folks!
- dools 12y ago
  Yep, folks is a good go-to term I reckon. Or peeps :)
- dataminded 12y ago
  Great suggestion.
rdlecler1 12y ago
If person/people wasn't a two syllable word would we use that instead? Maybe "peeps" needs to be adopted.
- grayclhn 12y ago
  "All"
- ghaff 12y ago
  They are used a bit. "IT people just don't get the problem" sounds fine to my ear and I see that kind of construction. (Which has a slightly different nuance from IT doesn't get it.) It's a bit clinical and impersonal but something like that is what I'd probably use in an official marketing doc. Peeps, on the other hand, is very slangy and at least today carries the implications of acquaintances, as least as I've seen it used. As someone else mentioned, folks isn't a bad clearly general-neutral, casual term. And I use it from time to time in more casual writing.
Pxtl 12y ago
I've always been bothered by the fact that so few roles on the infrastructure/operations support side of things have an actual coherent job title. My team has developers, testers, and a business analyst. Their jobs have names. But my friends on the other side of the cube-farm in the rooms full of half-assembled PCs? They're all just "IT guys". They might have a proper title for their role, but nobody knows it.
- brazzledazzle 12y ago
  To be honest it sounds more like you haven't gotten to know them and their roles.
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    Oh I know their roles - there's the guy who owns all the images, the guy who handles file-system permissions, the guy who handles firewalls and virus scanners, etc. They have roles and specializations and whatnot, what they lack is a nice verb-oriented job title. Managers manage, developers develop, testers test, analysts analyze... they support and maintain and operate, but we don't call them a nice verby name like "operators", we just associate them with the noun Information Technology and so they get the abbreviation and suffix "I.T. Guys".
    - T-Winsnes 12y ago
      They sound like sysadmins to me :)
jheriko 12y ago
this is only going to go away if people use gender neutral terms naturally... its sad but true. i've always used guys to mean 'people' because there is no natural slang alternative. i'm now rethinking this, but its hard to retrain years of doing what i thought was correct in this manner. although in hindsight its so obvious i should have seen it :/ but at the same time nothing jumps to mind as an alternative. this is definitely problem, but i'm not sure how to actually fix it.
- aftbit 12y ago
  Y'all.
  - djur 12y ago
    "Y'all" and "folks" carry a bit of a cultural connotation. "Y'all" is identified with the South, and "folks" has a somewhat rural (folksy!) sound to it. I grew up without "y'all" and with "folks" almost exclusively referring to parents and grandparents, so I don't feel very natural using them. In chat, I'll use "folx". It's a private, unexplainable joke that also helps me feel a little less silly (by being a lot sillier).
jldugger 12y ago
This is really simple, people. s/ops guys/ops team/g. Done.
mindweather 12y ago
It's worth noting that this article is by Bridget [http://bridgetkromhout.com http://bridgetkromhout.com], not Julia [http://jvns.ca/ http://jvns.ca/]. Both of them are awesome. ;)

76 points by johnwards 12y ago

Here is a link to the actual graph she has on her blog: http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/ http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/ The important thing we as a community need to understand is that there are terms that can be very gender specific and at the same time being gender neutral depending on the context.

eterm 12y ago
Mostly that just seems to show that "guys" (plural) is taken as mostly neutral but "guy" (singular) is not.
- djur 12y ago
  That seems accurate to me. I do try to avoid 'guys' and 'dudes' in professional contexts, for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but it can be difficult to remember. Most of my closest friends are women, and 'hey guys' and 'hey dudes' are common greetings even when the group is all women (other than me). I don't usually address individuals by anything other than their name, but 'dude' is occasionally used for either a man or a woman, while 'guy' in the singular is clearly only for men. I mean, 'guy' is male-identified to the point that it's used as an indicator -- "guy stuff" versus "girl stuff", etc. It's not a huge stretch to perceive the plural as only quasi-neutral, addressing women by assumption rather than by explicit inclusion.

Squab 12y ago

Anything it takes to get more women in these type of fields is a good idea, imo. There's a slight perspective difference that I find really beneficial when working with women in tech. Besides the other obvious benefits.

Ronsenshi 12y ago

I was expecting something more on topic. First rule of the Fight Club is: > You do not talk about Fight Club Kind of expected something along those lines with more emphasis on the actual DevOps instead of meta talk about community. Still, interesting read.

Agathos 12y ago
The first rule of devops club is welcome to devops club. The second rule of devops club is welcome to devops club! The third rule of devops club: someone yells stop, goes limp, tests don't pass: the deployment is over. Roll back to your last known good Docker environment. Fourth rule: only two gu^H^H devops professionals to a deployment. Fifth rule: one deployment at a time. Sixth rule: no bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production. Seventh rule: deployments will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first night at devops club, you have to push something into production. (Some of these are more practical than others, I'll admit. Please don't practice rule 8, and I'm not sure what rule 7 even means.)
- VLM 12y ago
  Sixth rule: suggesting bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production results in the "burning lye" scene. And the on topic first rule, if you've ever read the book, is the first rule of devops guys is don't talk about devops "guys" in the presence of someone of the female persuasion.
  - Ronsenshi 12y ago
    Or maybe simplify: "You do not talk about DevOps guys"?
- vacri 12y ago
  Rule 5 is something that should be mentioned more often as a best practise when dealing with production: do one thing at a time. If you're doing several things at once, it's easy to miss an important step. Not so much a problem outside of production, but in production it can be quite harmful.

yeukhon 12y ago

> As for those conversations I had at devopsdays with the folks who thought they were “just” not devops enough? As a junior, my vision of devops is someone who is guarding staging and production, and release management, assuming you have a mature self-service platform for developers. As for why people feel they are not devops enough I think it is important to realize that devops is mainly a culture change (quoting from a coworker). Your devops can be your system admin. Your developers should know how to handle some operations, because they will have to work with the SRE/devops. There should be a structure, a list of runbooks and procedures in place. Automation is only a syntactic sugar of blueprints, documentations, plans (recovery, backup, SLA, etc). DevOps should be the people that say NO to developer and NO to business and NO to upper management when you know something won't go well (e.g. there is a strict release/deployment requirements). So a mature DevOps team is essentially jack-of-all-trade go-to team. You write a lot, you talk a lot, you plan a lot, you maintain a lot, and you innovate a lot (looking at the big picture). Whether you are running a startup or an enterprise, automation is the last thing on your to-do list. To claify my last point: sure you should build your VPC and security groups using cloudformation if you are on AWS. But before doing that, you obviously need to start off with a discussion.

drobertduke 12y ago

Great article. I think part of the difficultly with the word "guys" in particular is that it depends on the usage. Saying "hey guys" or "you guys" when referring to mixed company is generally interpreted as gender neutral. But talking about "ops guys" or "a guy" is definitely not gender neutral.

ealexhudson 12y ago
Brilliant article; I've caught myself making the same mistake many times even though I try hard to avoid it. I do think that saying "hey guys" (or similar) is the gateway drug - I find myself making the mistake much less often when I consciously attempt to erase all gender-associated terms. You can say "Hey people" or "Hey team", and get the same effect.
- vegedor 12y ago
  But, but team is not a personallity neutral term. How about just "Hey"? Short and precise. If talking to a single person, use "Ey" instead
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  The problem is that both of those have connotations that "Hey guys" doesn't. There isn't a good mixed company informal term.
gaius 12y ago
"Guy" and "dude" are definitely gender-nonspecific these days, and I don't mean just in tech. When those tapes of Tiger Woods were leaked, he called his mistresses "dude". Language has evolved.
- skywhopper 12y ago
  Regardless of what you think about it, plenty of people disagree. As a plural, sure "guys" can generally mean a mixed group, but as a singular noun used in a generic sense (eg, "we need a devops guy"), I challenge you to find any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman. In a professional setting, it's important to use language carefully. And in a situation like this where you have evidence that at least some people feel using "guy" and "guys" is a poor choice, and where there are plenty of equivalent alternatives ("folks" is my go-to), the only reason to use "guy" is to be a jerk. Don't be a jerk.

VLM 12y ago

"of whom perhaps 98% were guys" In my extensive non-coastal observation of ops centers, mostly at very large companies, the male-female ratio in ops is much more "normal" than the dev group ratio (which is often all male). Then again I've never worked with anyone who would go to a ops-conference (what do you guys talk about?). This may result in some audience bias, if the audience at a con is entirely mid/upper mgmt (probably all male), or marketing people and startup founders trying to sell stuff to ops mgmt. She might be seeing a mgmt glass ceiling and thinking it has something to do with ops at the bottom of the pyramid. I have observed that the more competently run the ops dept (procedures, decent mgmt, staffing by butts on seats 24x7 instead of on call) the more likely you'll see women working there. I worked at a huge telco that had an all female fiber ops center during 3rd shift some part of the week, for example. Its not too far fetched that a good indication you have professional adults running a place instead of kids, is having female ops team members. Counting them is probably not the dumbest possible metric for a quick eval of a company.

soyiuz 12y ago

I started using "folks" much more for this reason. It is just as folksy as "guys" but more inclusive. Thanks, folks!

dools 12y ago
Yep, folks is a good go-to term I reckon. Or peeps :)
dataminded 12y ago
Great suggestion.

rdlecler1 12y ago

If person/people wasn't a two syllable word would we use that instead? Maybe "peeps" needs to be adopted.

grayclhn 12y ago
"All"
ghaff 12y ago
They are used a bit. "IT people just don't get the problem" sounds fine to my ear and I see that kind of construction. (Which has a slightly different nuance from IT doesn't get it.) It's a bit clinical and impersonal but something like that is what I'd probably use in an official marketing doc. Peeps, on the other hand, is very slangy and at least today carries the implications of acquaintances, as least as I've seen it used. As someone else mentioned, folks isn't a bad clearly general-neutral, casual term. And I use it from time to time in more casual writing.

Pxtl 12y ago

I've always been bothered by the fact that so few roles on the infrastructure/operations support side of things have an actual coherent job title. My team has developers, testers, and a business analyst. Their jobs have names. But my friends on the other side of the cube-farm in the rooms full of half-assembled PCs? They're all just "IT guys". They might have a proper title for their role, but nobody knows it.

brazzledazzle 12y ago
To be honest it sounds more like you haven't gotten to know them and their roles.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Oh I know their roles - there's the guy who owns all the images, the guy who handles file-system permissions, the guy who handles firewalls and virus scanners, etc. They have roles and specializations and whatnot, what they lack is a nice verb-oriented job title. Managers manage, developers develop, testers test, analysts analyze... they support and maintain and operate, but we don't call them a nice verby name like "operators", we just associate them with the noun Information Technology and so they get the abbreviation and suffix "I.T. Guys".
  - T-Winsnes 12y ago
    They sound like sysadmins to me :)

jheriko 12y ago

this is only going to go away if people use gender neutral terms naturally... its sad but true. i've always used guys to mean 'people' because there is no natural slang alternative. i'm now rethinking this, but its hard to retrain years of doing what i thought was correct in this manner. although in hindsight its so obvious i should have seen it :/ but at the same time nothing jumps to mind as an alternative. this is definitely problem, but i'm not sure how to actually fix it.

aftbit 12y ago
Y'all.
- djur 12y ago
  "Y'all" and "folks" carry a bit of a cultural connotation. "Y'all" is identified with the South, and "folks" has a somewhat rural (folksy!) sound to it. I grew up without "y'all" and with "folks" almost exclusively referring to parents and grandparents, so I don't feel very natural using them. In chat, I'll use "folx". It's a private, unexplainable joke that also helps me feel a little less silly (by being a lot sillier).

jldugger 12y ago

This is really simple, people. s/ops guys/ops team/g. Done.

mindweather 12y ago

It's worth noting that this article is by Bridget [http://bridgetkromhout.com http://bridgetkromhout.com], not Julia [http://jvns.ca/ http://jvns.ca/]. Both of them are awesome. ;)