[dkersten]

Developers should be involved in managing everything about their applications, including infrastructure.

As a software engineer, there is just no way I can stay up to date with my craft as well as everything there is to know about infrastructure AND the all important security. I don't know about all the latest kernel patches and firewall rules. I don't know about monitoring failed hard drives. Etc.

I mean, I do know a lot about deploying and maintaining my running software, but Ops has a ton of other concerns that themselves are a full time job and I already have my time fully consumed by development tasks. I'm also ok with being pushed enough of the work so that I don't accidentally make software that's a PITA to deploy or manage and that I don't needlessly wake somebody else. That doesn't mean that I can take on the entire job (well, I can, but I wouldn't be doing as good a job, especially when security and such is concerned, and I wouldn't be doing as good a development job either). What next - DevOpsSalesMarkettingAccounting?

Much better, IMO, is to have small tightly-knit cross-functional teams which include an ops engineer.

[mnm1]

I couldn't agree more. Not only that, but trying to context switch between ops and development is a nightmare. The two positions are nothing alike. Most of my time as a sysdamin, I spent waiting and reading HN while super slow shit happens. It's basically a glorified secretarial position that deals with machines rather than humans. Every few minutes, I have to run another command, check output, respond to some AWS rep, etc. Basically, the absolute opposite mindset and skillset of what's needed to do proper development. After a few hours of that, switching back to development is almost impossible.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

> well, I can, but I wouldn't be doing as good a job

You do a better job communicating with yourself though?

[dkersten]

Sure, but any advantage from that is lost in the fact that I've lost a ton of development time on doing ops tasks, which I don't have time to do properly and don't have time to learn how to do properly. Even bad communication to a competent ops person who does have time to, you know, do their job, and does have time to stay up to date, will result in much better results than if I tried to fit the work into my schedule.

For example, in my current work, I could try to figure all the ops stuff out, but I've already got a backlog of months of development tasks for a project that needs to be done asap.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

I'd like to argue the advantage is sometimes lost, but not often.

[dkersten]

In my personal experience, writing complex software with complex infrastructure requirements, I have never had an advantage in not allowing other, more specialised people, to handle concerns outside my core competency (which is software developnent). Other people may be smarter or more efficient than I, or have more time available, or have simpler requirements.