[nojito]

Or course it is.

Where did we get the idea that engineers are hired to do only one thing?

This has never ever been the case in my experience.

Also Kafka being hard this manage is not the case. A simple look into many small companies and startups running their own clusters shows otherwise.

[agounaris]

Engineers are hired to deliver and produce value. Tooling can be a part of it but if you can outsource something which is not your source of income, you have to do it. Engineering time is more valuable.

I also know many startups and small companies investing 5 people and 6 months to get an observability platform up and running while they could just get datadog or new relic for half the price... and I don't get into account outages and updates to the platform.

I remember a recent uber blog post on how they moved from build tool A to build tool B and a couple of weeks later, 3000 people where laid off. It's important to spend development time on revenue streams.

This is some nice piece of advice https://nav.al/build-a-team-that-ships

"Outsource everything that isn’t core. Resist the urge to pick up that last dollar. Founders do Customer Service."

[cthalupa]

>Where did we get the idea that engineers are hired to do only one thing?

At a certain size or number of self run services, they very well might be. I used to be the guy that did the set up for these sort of self managed solutions, and ran them day to day. In some shops the workload was high enough we needed multiple people like me doing it. Or a whole team. Doing DevOps style management of them just let us do it with fewer people - it certainly didn't make it feasible for developers to do the day to day management of these services and still write code.