[lox]

My take is different. I think DevOps was wildly successful, most of our infrastructure is now software that can be managed by Software Engineers. The goal posts have shifted, we now have major software challenges where as before we had hardware and operational challenges.

Well written tools and cross-functional teams that do both operations, feature work and security are still the path forward IMO, we just need to refocus on developer experience.

[hedora]

We tried to hire senior devs to do DevOps work, but the ones that can pass the interview and have already been at a DevOps shop are too smart to be fooled a second time.

We still use all the DevOps buzzword stacks, but we stopped doing dev ops. Instead, we are building out a really good ops team. This makes it possible to hire developers again.

Personally, I'm one of the better ops people on the developer side of the fence, but I'd need at least 2x typical principle engineer comp to take another job at a DevOps shop, and also wouldn't get even a quarter of my normal productivity.

At that point, you may as well just hire a junior undergrad graduate and burn the rest of your cash.

[tkiolp4]

As a software engineer I don’t want to touch your infrastructure code. I have been lucky so far and I have been doing pure product development instead of being a devops. I do believe though in the idea of cross functional teams: designer, developer, infra engineers, managers.

[abhishektwr]

And now 50% time software engineers are writing infrastructure. Don’t know what is solution but cloud-native landscape has increased cognitive overload.

[clouded]

The point is obviously to pay less people to do more work. What I don't get is when developers themselves are in favor of it like I constantly see with this devops stuff. There's no way they have any kind of life outside of their job. There's no way they have a wife or children, otherwise I simply don't believe for a second they would be in favor of "developers own all the things yay!".

[moduspol]

> What I don't get is when developers themselves are in favor of it

If you're comfortable with AWS and have built things as a software developer, it becomes clear very quickly. These things are intrinsically linked, and pretending they aren't is just kicking the can down the road until you have to solve some non-trivial problem.

There have been huge innovations and value-adds over the last 10+ years in cloud and serverless, yet everywhere I've worked that silos "DevOps" from devs has already baked in the culture that devs can just avoid knowing anything about AWS, that DevOps will be the gatekeepers, and that devs can just work within the "lowest common denominator" box of tooling that those gatekeepers think is appropriate. Meanwhile, infra costs are skyrocketing but it's all good because we're mostly "cloud agnostic."

I don't want to just be closing Jira tickets. I want to actually solve business problems well. And to do that, I don't want to be constrained to someone else's "box," throwing code over the wall to them, and hoping for the best.

[clouded]

I get paid pretty well fixing bugs and writing code, that stuff you call "just closing Jira tickets" and "throwing code over the wall". It's also enough to fry my brain and leave me exhausted. But it's obviously worth next to nothing in your view. So yeah, I don't care. I can't figure out if you're going to have to find people a lot smarter than me to do what you're looking for, or people a lot dumber than me.

[moduspol]

> It's also enough to fry my brain and leave me exhausted. But it's obviously worth next to nothing in your view.

It's fine up until you have to solve hard problems. Once you need autoscaling or more of a datastore than you can get from vertically scaling a relational database, your brain will be REALLY fried trying to solve those things without touching anything at the Kubernetes or AWS layer.

Or it won't really be fried, because it won't really get solved. That's the pattern I've seen more often: just keep scaling up the CPU and RAM for individual containers / instances because devs can't solve it without DevOps, and DevOps can't solve it without devs. Cloud costs keep going up, and the problem's not really solved, but at least nobody had to understand more than they wanted to.

[dilyevsky]

+1 tiny teams run infrastructure that previously was responsibility of whole departments at bigco and things mostly work well. Then as soon as they face some minor, totally solvable issues everyone loses their minds.

[ketzo]

Yeah, how much of this is just a matter of perspective?

I’ve never touched a computer running my company’s production software, and I never will.

20 years ago, that would have been literally inconceivable with someone who was called a “Software Engineer.”