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by wpietri
2300 days ago
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As a recovering sysadmin, I'd say it's not just a rebranding. Sysadmin work was a mix of hardware, networking, OS, and app operations. With the rise of AWS, etc, a lot of that work got spun off to cloud operators. The "cattle not pets" shift removed another chunk of it. So true devops work is more applying developer thinking to what was left of operations. But I want to address this part: > If developers are expected to take more roles, doesn't that turn development into "second class" work if no one is left to fill a dedicated role for software development? The answer is no. My dad started writing software in 1968. From the way he tells it, good developers never just threw things over the wall. They made things for people to use, things that ran efficiently within the constraints of the platform of the day. I feel the same way today. Devops approaches give teams control over (and responsibility for) the whole lifecycle of the software they write. That's great! Instead of wondering what happens over in ops-land and hoping we get it right, now we can make sure it's right. And this is aided by the rise of the observability movement, giving developers the ability to see inside the running software. To my mind, there's no such thing as "dedicated" software development, where it happens in isolation. That's like wanting to cook food without caring whether people eat it or how they're enjoying it. I think it's great that teams are expected to operate what they build, and are given the right tools for that. |
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Honestly, to some degree, it is a rebranding which makes me sad. It's a rebranding because companies didn't change their company culture or change the job requirements. Devops is a new job consisting of sysadmin duties and developer abilities, and the time to actually work on things. Worse, as "on-call code janitors", they often are at the bottom of the totem at a company. (As a developer it is important to understand a company's totem. Google has engineers at the top of the totem; Salesforce has sales at the top. Apple puts design at the top.)Denying devops the time to do both makes you complicit in it merely being a rebranding. Denying the devops team both SWE and sysadmin makes for either a dev team or a sysadmin team but not a SRE team.
There are companies that "get it". But there are far more that don't. We, as devops, have no system for "Apple's role id 1234 isn't actually a devops role. If you want want to be a sysadmin, whos paid well, please apply, but it's not the promised land where you, as an individual who wants to live in the CI/CD SRE promised land, want to go.
Thus, it's ~meaningless everytime I see the string "devops" in a job posting because without further interrogation, I can't know if the job is dev, or ops, or devops. Which is where it actually counts.