[jdoss]

> Ops is not peripheral to the job, ops is an essential part of the job.

I am 100% with you on this point. Ops is treated as a cost center vs a core feature. This means it is often a chore to maintain and the first thing to get scrutinized when it comes to budget.

> I advocate to stop splitting the job of dev and ops into separate roles and doing the devops practices for everybody. We lose theorized competitive advantage but gain flexibility and more well-rounded skill sets so we really can call ourselves software engineers.

You lost me here however. Software engineers often do not want to think about the Ops problem their code will create over time. Either they do not have the skills to know what they don't know or they are being pushed by the business to work on "business value" over sharpening the Ops axe so their current code runs well for the best possible price.

Growing those skills are either not a priority for them personally (not a dig at all, I think it is totally fine for people to have personal limits on what they want to learn) or a priority for the business so they can't learn how to do things better. This is why you are seeing a boom of making PaaS the thing that is used to deploy software which is super expensive for what it is, limited in features, and limited in choice when you want to move to a new provider.

I am all for making Ops easier for everyone to consume, but in the end, if you don't understand the fundamentals of the underlying plumbing you are going to have sub-optimal results. To use your residential plumber analogy, of course you can fix your plumbing yourself, but having an expert plumber do the job not only saves time but often money in the long run. That's why you hire them. Expecting every home owner to have the time to grow the skills to be a functional plumber is unreasonable. Why do we as an Industry allow the C suite to expect developers to be functional operators? They took the "DevOps" movement and used it to shove all the responsibility onto developers to cut FTE count on the SysAdmin/Systems Eng side of the house.

The tech industry has devalued Systems Administration and Systems Engineering in a race to bottom in order to cut costs in the short term and that's why we pay out the nose for Cloud Services that are used by non experts to create over engineered setups.

[Kinrany]

> Software engineers often do not want to think about the Ops problem their code will create over time

That's an easy problem: pay them less and make it clear that this is why

[WJW]

It's never an easy problem when people have the option to just not work for your company at all. You'd have to make it extremely clear upfront too, or the amount of lawsuits would be never ending I think.

Finally, it would be interesting to see how people prioritize. I could see people willing to take a pay cut in exchange for not to having to worry about ops stuff ever again. Throw in not having to do the on-call rotations and you could probably even use it as a recruiting benefit.