[jfindley]

As long as that very description is spelled out clearly near the top of the job ad, it doesn't matter terribly much (within reason) what you call it - job searchers will try various different strings to find it. Personally, I'd call it an ops role, however.

In general, most of the issues I've seen with these sorts of roles aren't the naming of them but rather the third bullet in your list. Having an ops role that's responsible for all the problems with software they didn't build and weren't allowed to have meaningful input to the design/implementation of isn't healthy. It sucks up their time and energy fighting fires they didn't create and likely aren't really empowered to fix. This is the problem with this role (as often implemented) that Rachel talks about in her first paragraph.

If you really care about having a good and reliable product you need people involved with the design and implementation that are deeply invested in making it reliable and maintainable in the long term - which means either making your dev roles shoulder some of the oncall burden or having people that straddle the ops and dev teams. Or both. If you're having difficulty filling this role, perhaps this is the real problem?

[joshstrange]

I haven’t started trying to hire for this position yet, it’s been something I’ve been thinking of for a while though. Right a small number of developers, myself included, are on call and I’d like to reduce that a bit or just share the burden.

My goal isn’t to throw crap over the fence and say “make it work” but rather empower someone to make maintaining and growing our platform their main goal. The developers (again, myself included) are not great at the ops side of things and can rarely focus on the infrastructure itself due to other priorities (yes, we can talk about how that itself is an issue). If I could clone myself and one of specialize in ops and the other on programming for the platform I would in a heartbeat.

Infra/Ops and programming are two different mindsets (much like managing people or qa differs from writing code). Switching between them is hard and you pay a penalty to do so. Not to mention there are skills (networking is high on that list) that I’m not good at. I can scrape by but that’s not where my skills lie. That’s why I’d like to hire someone who is good at it, who _does_ enjoy it, and who push for changes from a ops perspective that I can’t due to time or skill.

[jfindley]

> Infra/Ops and programming are two different mindsets [...]

HARD disagree on this. I've done both. Most of the really excellent programmers I've worked with have, at least a little. You can't write highly reliable networking software without a deep understanding of how networking actually works. You can't write highly performing software without a deep understanding of the infrastructure and hardware it's running on. And so on.

I'm not trying to bersmirch yours or your teams abilities here - if you're writing in a high level language and most of your challenges are implementing biz logic then not knowing very much about the underlying infrastructure and hardware is fine, you aren't trying to write a distributed RDBMS, you probably don't need to know this stuff.

But do remember that there are lots of people for whom the hardware, the infrastructure and the application they're writing are inextricably linked. It's not a different mindset, it's just people with additional skills you haven't needed to learn yet.

[joshstrange]

Note that I said mindset not skillset.

I have zero doubt that I could do an Ops job well, what I can’t do is switch between writing business logic and maintaining servers at the drop of a hat. Similar to how I can’t go from QA to engineer without a context switch/penalty.

As I said elsewhere in this thread if I could clone myself and do both roles I would in an instant. But if I have to pick one I’d pick writing code (as my primary thing), not saying that Ops doesn’t write code, just not the same type of code.

[attendant3446]

For me it's very similar, I was in dev, now I'm in ops and I can easily switch back. But to think that all good programmers can do infra is a falsehood.

I've met so many developers who don't even know how computers really work. They're good at a particular tech stack and do their job very well, but they can't do much else. Let alone infra.

Personally, I agree that it's two different mindsets, but sometimes they can overlap.