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From personal experience, I've seen a correlation between software companies that "outsource" their devops and software companies that write bad software. This

by latch 12y ago

From personal experience, I've seen a correlation between software companies that "outsource" their devops and software companies that write bad software. This is more pronounced the more "magic" you get (Heroku for example). Put differently, the best backend developers are also the ones that can compile nginx from source (a rare talent nowadays apparently) and have it running reliably within the hour. Better by no small factor either. There's no shortage of them.

prostoalex 12y ago
Yeah, the word "companies" describes everything from a one-man shop to Google, and at certain point a devops person/department/division is a must. Platform-as-a-service companies are trying to prolong that "certain point". A few years back you could have the same argument with an army of Exchange administrators who would point out how ridiculous it would be to trust your entire company's email infrastructure to Gmail, yet here we are.
andrioni 12y ago
Isn't compiling nginx from source just a `./configure; make; make install`? I mean, any developer who has ever used a *nix-like probably knows the classical three-command incantation.
- latch 12y ago
  Last time I was part of the process to interview devops, we asked this question (pairing remotely tmux'd into an ec2 instance). I think we went through 10 people before we found 1 that could do it. And, of course, when he did it, it took him like 5 minutes. Everyone else struggled. "but I use a package manager" was the most common complaint. You do need things like build-essential installed (which we'd let them install however they wanted). And a blank ./configure normally complains about missing pcre and maybe gzip (I forget). But we'd just tell them they could install without it (and the error message makes it very clear how to do that (--without-pcre or whatever). Very sad.

by latch 12y ago

prostoalex 12y ago

Yeah, the word "companies" describes everything from a one-man shop to Google, and at certain point a devops person/department/division is a must. Platform-as-a-service companies are trying to prolong that "certain point". A few years back you could have the same argument with an army of Exchange administrators who would point out how ridiculous it would be to trust your entire company's email infrastructure to Gmail, yet here we are.

andrioni 12y ago

Isn't compiling nginx from source just a `./configure; make; make install`? I mean, any developer who has ever used a *nix-like probably knows the classical three-command incantation.

latch 12y ago
Last time I was part of the process to interview devops, we asked this question (pairing remotely tmux'd into an ec2 instance). I think we went through 10 people before we found 1 that could do it. And, of course, when he did it, it took him like 5 minutes. Everyone else struggled. "but I use a package manager" was the most common complaint. You do need things like build-essential installed (which we'd let them install however they wanted). And a blank ./configure normally complains about missing pcre and maybe gzip (I forget). But we'd just tell them they could install without it (and the error message makes it very clear how to do that (--without-pcre or whatever). Very sad.