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by diarrhea 1053 days ago
That situation sounds reasonable though. I don’t believe in tearing down all silos. Expertise and preferences exist, it’s human nature. I always thought the DevOps mantra of having one person be good at both was a fruitless endeavour. Have Dev and Ops collaborate closely, yes, but let them be separate people (not teams!). It’s fine. You know how to dev and ops, and I don’t doubt it. I do too. But if we focused that same energy and expertise, we’d be double the devs/ops. Nevertheless, people like us are excellent glue for organisations. At the same time, teams and organisations of only us would be quite pointless.

I feel similarly about fullstack. You’re a front end dev that has written a controller and used an ORM before. Often not too inspiring. Backend devs are still needed, whereas full stack devs form excellent glue.
2 comments
starttoaster 1048 days ago
You’re right. And it wasn’t my intent to editorialize (to imply I feel one way or the other about the subject.) But I can read how an opinion could be inferred. Anyway, my actual opinion is that people like us tend to be more useful than not, but also it definitely takes people with more specialized knowledge to make progress with some organization goals. For example, at my current role we have a team of people with a much deeper background in mathematics (we’re in the financial sector), algorithms, and computer science in general. Due to a life event, I dropped out of my computer science degree towards the end of my second year, and ended up pulling myself through operations roles (which I typically found comparatively boring) until I landed in DevOps after a lot of open source work and networking. But I am not as strong as some of my peers in mathematics, algorithms, and computer science topics (what is a big/little endian lol?)

Anyway, cheers. In short, I agree with your take.

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jahewson 1053 days ago
> Have Dev and Ops collaborate closely

That’s what DevOps is… or, was. I remember when it was new; that was the whole thing: dev and ops should work together. A break from the norm of the time that dev throws it over the wall to ops and never thinks about it again. What a tragedy that it’s been cargo-culted into its current meaning of “devs do ops” (poorly).

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