[knightofmars]

There's a fundamental difference between holding engineers accountable for the downstream impact of their technical decisions and making engineers take on the added responsibilities of an additional position without compensating them accordingly for the added responsibility. In an organization that prioritizes stability there is an appropriate balance between engineering and system administration as well as potential overlap given the right boundaries and understanding of job responsibilities. The engineering team will be held accountable by the system administration team and changes will happen because of it.

The inherent failing in this structure is when one of two things happens; one, the system administration team does not have the appropriate channels (and clout) to provide push back against the engineering team; two, the technical teams (both engineering and system administration) don't have the ability to get technical debt payed off properly due to an improperly structured project management process.

Anecdotally, I've been witness to the second issue a number of times. If there isn't an immediate understanding of ROI for a proposed change then it isn't prioritized to be worked on. The thought process is generally along the lines of, "Engineers are an expensive resource, having them working on something that won't make the company money is obviously not the priority."

While some of this is on the engineering leadership as their job is to provide insight into ROI for technical matters there also needs to be a balance where the non-technical leadership trusts the technical leadership to know when to prioritize projects with non-obvious ROI.

[karmajunkie]

Definitely agree with much of that, though I don't think it detracts too much from my main point. Most of the companies I work with don't have the luxury of dedicated ops people, and those that do I still think insulate developers too much from the production environment.