[TurboHaskal]

In practice, and talking from my experience, unless you're one of the lucky few this is what it really means to do DevOps in 2019:

- Forget what the books said, theory, semantics and idealism. You are a DevOps Engineer, working in a platform specific team.

- You deal with Jenkins or similar, and consult other teams or developers to write scripts for it, or worse, do the work for them since they're too busy doing actual programming.

- Contrary to what they say, other than tiny scripts you are not programming much anymore, unless you consider configuration management to be programming.

- You are not allowed to come up with your own abstractions. Proposals to develop anything are automatically declined by your Product Owner, who simply points you to whatever tool with a fancy logo he could find listed in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

- You pride yourself for being an engineer, but decisions end up being only made in terms of getting free open source labor and ease up hiring, so you end up doing what everyone else is doing.

- Half of your team co-workers are perfectly fine dealing with churn, software updates and other sort of manual, classic sysadmin tasks.

- You are repeatedly being paged at night for problems that your fellow developers won't feel responsible for. You hear buzzwords and talks about this SRE thing or "you built it, you run it", but it never seems to materialise due to politics.

- You are getting a feel that cloud providers are not really making things easier nor cheaper.

It used to be a lot of fun back in the day, and a great chance to get paid to solve interesting problems related to system and infrastructure engineering instead of the boring CRUD work that plagued the last decades, but seeing the "App Store" that this turned into, if you are a creative individual with a software engineering background and you're considering a career in DevOps, my advice is to run away while you can.

[fred_is_fred]

This is so accurate it makes me want to cry. Devops has become "run Jenkins & take page outs". 99.99% of enterprise devs (99.99% of those code in Java) have 0 clue what happens to their code after they commit it to Stash, and worse yet, they don't want to know. It's so bad now I'm embarrassed to have it on my LinkedIn profile.

[bionsystem]

You forgot :

- deal with management who wont pay for a support license because the product is "Open Source"

- spend weeks troubleshooting dependancy hells for applications with no documentation and no architecture and listening devs tell you that "it works on their laptop" (but somehow they can't give you a working requirements.txt or equivalent)

- the immense pleasure of using apt, pip, npm, and all of their cousins behind corporate proxies

- deal with information security departments who have no idea what you are doing, and thus feel threatened and block all of your initiatives by default

- deal with infrastructure departments who are building their own internal cloud infrastructure, with no budget (hello again free "Open Source"), and won't label it "prod-ready" after 4 or 5 years while support for their legacy is dropped

- convince management that they may have to give some training to their 60 "integrators" and 80 "exploit" teams that are still copying and pasting shell scripts from Word documents written last decade or earlier

[hermitdev]

Personally, I don't like DrvOps, either. I think it does a disservice to both devs and ops.

At current job, its kind of frustrating in that ee act as if we're doing dev ops, but as a dev, when a (my) job fails, ops doesn't trust me to either abort or restart the job.

So we've got all the buzzwords, none of the benefit.

Typical support call: ops calls me with the failed job. I log in, take a look see; tell them to download a file and restart a job. Whole lot takes an hour because I dont have permissions in prod to do anything but look at the log. Take that definition of devops and whove it up your ass.

I do recognize its not like this everywhere, but thays how it is at my current company, and they want to call it dev ops. More like roadblock he'll.

[hermitdev]

Ugh, I just read my comment, and I apologize for all of the typos. Wrote it on my phone, and it's too late to edit. Sorry.

[m23khan]

wow, it is as if you wrote something what I experienced exactly last year. That caused me to quit DevOps Engineering as a career after spending 5+ years in it. I went back to development having realized that just becoming tool expert won't be of much help especially in era where Devs themselves are keen to learn k8s, AWS automation, and CI/CD setup.

[dec0dedab0de]

My company calls what I do DevOps but I write full stack webapps to support the network operations team. I prefer to call it OpsDev, but noone seems to agree with me.

[peterwwillis]

DevOps has nothing to do with writing code or doing ops. Think of DevOps as a synonym for Agile and Lean, but not specific to software development.

[sqldba]

I do OpsDev too and I’m a fan of the term!

I’m an ops engineer but develop the code to do my team’s operations tasks.

[Mandatum]

This is in my mind what an SRE with a strong development background should be doing.

[znpy]

A lot of devops positions look like “a sysadmin to babysit developers”.

I’ll be starting a devops role next month, hopefully it will not be like this.

[peterwwillis]

> if you are a creative individual with a software engineering background and you're considering a career in DevOps

Well there's your first mistake. DevOps is not a career, unless you are a management consultant.