7 ms·

Karojisatsu – Leaving the DevOps Community

115 points by sethvargo 12y ago

Animats 12y ago
That's the price of the lean organization. Some must die for the bottom line.
- arcosdev 12y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted....this is a direct result of profit first, 10x bullshit.
  - olalonde 12y ago
    Probably because he is 1) singling out the lean movement for no apparent reason 2) being hyperbolic (except for the odd psychopath, I'm fairly sure the vast majority of business owners do not believe "some must die for the bottom line").
    - ealexhudson 12y ago
      A 'lean' organisation is more likely to rely on a small number of individuals, or one person, to manage a large deployment. The devops approach gives a single good engineer a large amount of leverage in terms of deployment, but that will then bring a commensurate increase in pressure on that individual. I think it's a fair criticism of lean principles that it increases the pressure on individuals. I agree most business owners wouldn't believe anything close to "some must die" - however, I do believe that inaction is almost as bad, and I do think mental health / wellness doesn't get anything like enough thought or attention. The harder you work your staff, and the more pressure you heap on them, the more you have to focus on them as individuals and support them better.
- davexunit 12y ago
  I feel like it's time for software developers (and other tech workers) to unionize.
- ffn 12y ago
  Yep. In other words, it's the price of efficiency - the desire to have everything now and the fear of missing the opportunity. But, of course, the question we have to ask is "do we really need to be that efficient?" I know nothing about big companies, but here in small business / startup land, the question becomes "do I really need hockey-stick growth?", "do I really have to release MVP by this hackathon?", "does it really matter if X invests in me or not?" And time and time again, I've been told the answer was a resounding "yes" by employers, investors, managers, etc., yet when I answered "no" (usually because my inadequate technical skills), the world continued to spin, my business continue to exist, and my technical abilities continued to slowly get better. While the wily freelancer / engineer should always boost his safety margin by telling his boss 6 months minimum when he's done it before in 2 months, I've found through experience the best thing to do regarding minimizing my own internal stress is to admit to myself that I don't need to be the best, the "A" student, the hotest new company, 30 under 30, or what have you. Instead, it's far more critical for me to enjoy my work and make enough money to survive comfortably in 2015. If the vicissitudes of life (in the form of my boss, investors, clients, etc.) decides to give me success, then great, but if not, I'm content being humbly myself. To someone who hasn't gone through a career related burnout, failed a business, or whatnot, the above spiel probably sounds like the fatalistic whining of a weakling. The fact is, there is no sense pretending (especially to yourself) that you're somehow strong or a badass. It's much better than to cast out pride, get verbally peed on by your disappointed bosses, and do things at your own pace than it is to push yourself to the point you come to hate the thing you've invested so much time into.
click170 12y ago
Its irritating that as soon as I start scrolling, a little popup appears asking me to subscribe to the site. The popup is out of view on mobile devices, leading to an experience where this page just turns dark gray after I try and scroll.
brazzy 12y ago
I guess that's one danger of work and hobby being the same thing: when you get tired or run into problems, you may have nothing to turn to.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- alphonse23 12y ago
  that might be a pretty accurate assessment of Carlo -- from reading his tweets, it sounds like he was juggling multiple realities -- I knew him actually -- I really wish he waiting long enough for someone to talk him out of it...
contingencies 12y ago
In Australia they have free phone numbers for people to call who are in distress for whatever reason. Don't they have that in the US?
- frankwiles 12y ago
  Yes the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 800-273-8255. Stories and situations like this is one of the reasons I accepted a board position at http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/ http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/. It's very preventable with the right treatment at the right time.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Not only that, if you search Google for how to commit suicide, Google returns as special large-format card with that info: https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png
- bigiain 12y ago
  It _might_ help, but it doesn't solve the problem. (I'm sitting here in Sydney still trying to deal with the guilt over a friend who committed suicide this week - we'd been making and rescheduing plans to get together for a beer/catchup since before xmas. I have no idea if he wanted to talk about how rough business/life/family was, or if anything I could have said or done would have made any difference...)
- pronoiac 12y ago
  There are suicide prevention hotlines around the world: http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/ThereIsHelp http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/ThereIsHelp (I run this wiki, and this is something that makes me really happy and eager to.)
fadzlan 12y ago
Which part of it says leaving the DevOps Community? This is more like leaving the world?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mcfunley 12y ago
I'm just now putting two and two together, but I now realize that I saw Carlos talk about his haproxyctl project at the Pasadena meetup last month. He projected enthusiasm and earnestness in a way that had me grinning from ear to ear. This is a major bummer.
yeukhon 12y ago
> In our industry a lot of young IT professionals use the term “burnout” as a badge of honor. That's me, but I feel the burnout at the same time. On one hand it is me who is addicted to working, and on the other hand I just can't start thinking that doing more would allow me to work on something more interesting, like a mad scientist trying to solve some mystery. But half of what I do are break-fixes, and can't even start working on real devops, gaming changing practice. The culture - devops, building practice is part of my job, but often I don't see me doing that...my responsibility exceeds my title, my role right now, which is great for career growth. I don't know man... I'm 23.
- devonkim 12y ago
  As someone almost ten years older that has been basically in the same position, I think you have to challenge yourself sufficiently to grow if your job itself won't challenge you appropriately. If your organization is too uncaring to change, life is too short to deal with bad jobs. But it is always worth working towards skills that will get you a better job. That is, do the minimum to say employed but put the real focus into getting to a saner, smarter company. I say appropriate because to me the whole point of modern devops is about having the entire organization work smarter, not harder, and together on the right things to be able to stay sane. Where I am, I know that the wider organization is completely not capable of actually fixing itself (when your network team is still manually running ping and tcproute instead of having monitoring galore from every link to another either with vendor tools or something crude like Nagios, you're too far behind to ever catch up). So, even if my corner of the devops world is completely flawless, I will be basically handing off tickets to another team 100% of the time while my applications that depend upon them suffer the consequences. According to my boss I already am changing how others do things by showing the power of solid, modern tooling and instrumentation but it's awful hard to tell that any of it makes a difference when you're doing 20-hour days 3 days in a row all for issues you only diagnosed, none that you are directly responsible for.
DennisP 12y ago
I just read The Phoenix Project, the book mentioned at the end of the article. It's an entertaining look at what DevOps is supposed to be like, based on things happening at various real enterprises. The main character takes over an IT organization that's way behind on deadlines and experiencing one major disaster after another. He gradually transforms it with better practices, until everybody's living a stress-free, balanced life, and they're delivering much better results to the business. These two things don't need to be in conflict.
- ukigumo 12y ago
  I think I'll be reading that book soon because it deals with very much what I'm trying to do on a daily basis, except that I don't believe DevOps by itself is the magic bullet, instead a mix of the best practices from both the dev community and the enterprise world are what can make IT companies successful without the drama and the waste.
- coleca 12y ago
  Exactly. I've been a big fan of John Willis for awhile and the challenge that he, Gene Kim, and others have taken on to fix enterprise IT culture should be commended. They hit the nail on the head when they state that DevOps isn't about Puppet and Chef or the latest hotness on Github, but that the key to it is culture. The tools can help automate some processes, but without fixing the underlying culture it's missing the point. The Phoenix Project should be required reading for all IT professionals, especially senior leadership. If you've worked in IT for any amount of time you'd quickly recognize all the characters and wondered who from your organization told all your dirty laundry to Gene.

115 points by sethvargo 12y ago

Animats 12y ago

That's the price of the lean organization. Some must die for the bottom line.

arcosdev 12y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted....this is a direct result of profit first, 10x bullshit.
- olalonde 12y ago
  Probably because he is 1) singling out the lean movement for no apparent reason 2) being hyperbolic (except for the odd psychopath, I'm fairly sure the vast majority of business owners do not believe "some must die for the bottom line").
  - ealexhudson 12y ago
    A 'lean' organisation is more likely to rely on a small number of individuals, or one person, to manage a large deployment. The devops approach gives a single good engineer a large amount of leverage in terms of deployment, but that will then bring a commensurate increase in pressure on that individual. I think it's a fair criticism of lean principles that it increases the pressure on individuals. I agree most business owners wouldn't believe anything close to "some must die" - however, I do believe that inaction is almost as bad, and I do think mental health / wellness doesn't get anything like enough thought or attention. The harder you work your staff, and the more pressure you heap on them, the more you have to focus on them as individuals and support them better.
davexunit 12y ago
I feel like it's time for software developers (and other tech workers) to unionize.
ffn 12y ago
Yep. In other words, it's the price of efficiency - the desire to have everything now and the fear of missing the opportunity. But, of course, the question we have to ask is "do we really need to be that efficient?" I know nothing about big companies, but here in small business / startup land, the question becomes "do I really need hockey-stick growth?", "do I really have to release MVP by this hackathon?", "does it really matter if X invests in me or not?" And time and time again, I've been told the answer was a resounding "yes" by employers, investors, managers, etc., yet when I answered "no" (usually because my inadequate technical skills), the world continued to spin, my business continue to exist, and my technical abilities continued to slowly get better. While the wily freelancer / engineer should always boost his safety margin by telling his boss 6 months minimum when he's done it before in 2 months, I've found through experience the best thing to do regarding minimizing my own internal stress is to admit to myself that I don't need to be the best, the "A" student, the hotest new company, 30 under 30, or what have you. Instead, it's far more critical for me to enjoy my work and make enough money to survive comfortably in 2015. If the vicissitudes of life (in the form of my boss, investors, clients, etc.) decides to give me success, then great, but if not, I'm content being humbly myself. To someone who hasn't gone through a career related burnout, failed a business, or whatnot, the above spiel probably sounds like the fatalistic whining of a weakling. The fact is, there is no sense pretending (especially to yourself) that you're somehow strong or a badass. It's much better than to cast out pride, get verbally peed on by your disappointed bosses, and do things at your own pace than it is to push yourself to the point you come to hate the thing you've invested so much time into.

click170 12y ago

Its irritating that as soon as I start scrolling, a little popup appears asking me to subscribe to the site. The popup is out of view on mobile devices, leading to an experience where this page just turns dark gray after I try and scroll.

brazzy 12y ago

I guess that's one danger of work and hobby being the same thing: when you get tired or run into problems, you may have nothing to turn to.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
alphonse23 12y ago
that might be a pretty accurate assessment of Carlo -- from reading his tweets, it sounds like he was juggling multiple realities -- I knew him actually -- I really wish he waiting long enough for someone to talk him out of it...

contingencies 12y ago

In Australia they have free phone numbers for people to call who are in distress for whatever reason. Don't they have that in the US?

frankwiles 12y ago
Yes the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 800-273-8255. Stories and situations like this is one of the reasons I accepted a board position at http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/ http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/. It's very preventable with the right treatment at the right time.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Not only that, if you search Google for how to commit suicide, Google returns as special large-format card with that info: https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png
bigiain 12y ago
It _might_ help, but it doesn't solve the problem. (I'm sitting here in Sydney still trying to deal with the guilt over a friend who committed suicide this week - we'd been making and rescheduing plans to get together for a beer/catchup since before xmas. I have no idea if he wanted to talk about how rough business/life/family was, or if anything I could have said or done would have made any difference...)
pronoiac 12y ago
There are suicide prevention hotlines around the world: http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/ThereIsHelp http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/ThereIsHelp (I run this wiki, and this is something that makes me really happy and eager to.)

fadzlan 12y ago

Which part of it says leaving the DevOps Community? This is more like leaving the world?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mcfunley 12y ago

I'm just now putting two and two together, but I now realize that I saw Carlos talk about his haproxyctl project at the Pasadena meetup last month. He projected enthusiasm and earnestness in a way that had me grinning from ear to ear. This is a major bummer.

yeukhon 12y ago

> In our industry a lot of young IT professionals use the term “burnout” as a badge of honor. That's me, but I feel the burnout at the same time. On one hand it is me who is addicted to working, and on the other hand I just can't start thinking that doing more would allow me to work on something more interesting, like a mad scientist trying to solve some mystery. But half of what I do are break-fixes, and can't even start working on real devops, gaming changing practice. The culture - devops, building practice is part of my job, but often I don't see me doing that...my responsibility exceeds my title, my role right now, which is great for career growth. I don't know man... I'm 23.

devonkim 12y ago
As someone almost ten years older that has been basically in the same position, I think you have to challenge yourself sufficiently to grow if your job itself won't challenge you appropriately. If your organization is too uncaring to change, life is too short to deal with bad jobs. But it is always worth working towards skills that will get you a better job. That is, do the minimum to say employed but put the real focus into getting to a saner, smarter company. I say appropriate because to me the whole point of modern devops is about having the entire organization work smarter, not harder, and together on the right things to be able to stay sane. Where I am, I know that the wider organization is completely not capable of actually fixing itself (when your network team is still manually running ping and tcproute instead of having monitoring galore from every link to another either with vendor tools or something crude like Nagios, you're too far behind to ever catch up). So, even if my corner of the devops world is completely flawless, I will be basically handing off tickets to another team 100% of the time while my applications that depend upon them suffer the consequences. According to my boss I already am changing how others do things by showing the power of solid, modern tooling and instrumentation but it's awful hard to tell that any of it makes a difference when you're doing 20-hour days 3 days in a row all for issues you only diagnosed, none that you are directly responsible for.

DennisP 12y ago

I just read The Phoenix Project, the book mentioned at the end of the article. It's an entertaining look at what DevOps is supposed to be like, based on things happening at various real enterprises. The main character takes over an IT organization that's way behind on deadlines and experiencing one major disaster after another. He gradually transforms it with better practices, until everybody's living a stress-free, balanced life, and they're delivering much better results to the business. These two things don't need to be in conflict.

ukigumo 12y ago
I think I'll be reading that book soon because it deals with very much what I'm trying to do on a daily basis, except that I don't believe DevOps by itself is the magic bullet, instead a mix of the best practices from both the dev community and the enterprise world are what can make IT companies successful without the drama and the waste.
coleca 12y ago
Exactly. I've been a big fan of John Willis for awhile and the challenge that he, Gene Kim, and others have taken on to fix enterprise IT culture should be commended. They hit the nail on the head when they state that DevOps isn't about Puppet and Chef or the latest hotness on Github, but that the key to it is culture. The tools can help automate some processes, but without fixing the underlying culture it's missing the point. The Phoenix Project should be required reading for all IT professionals, especially senior leadership. If you've worked in IT for any amount of time you'd quickly recognize all the characters and wondered who from your organization told all your dirty laundry to Gene.