| HN Mirror

As both a developer and admin, it's a little hard for me to not think across the aisle. However, I can think of developers that basically refused to think outside their solo - they tend to fit the type of person that really doesn't like to go too far outside the bounds of their workday tasks. Not saying that everyone is this way, but you wouldn't ask John Carmack to try to think about continuous integration and deployment stuff while he's stuck reading physics books and reading a bunch of papers, would you? Yes, good devs tend to have the curiosity and, more importantly, the concern to think beyond just their immediate day to day concerns of hyper focus and in-depth knowledge.

Sometimes you just need to hire more people or ask the rest of the team to accommodate someone that's that one random oddball. A management book I read mentioned Phil Knight talking about how the Bulls had room for one Dennis Rodman and only one, and made it clear that nobody else can pull the stunts he does without disrupting the harmony.

There's a huge difference between a dev that does something a bit out of ignorance and one out of indignance.

Some companies have developers spend some time in SRE (I believe Google practices this sometimes) so they can gain some insight, but it may not be the best idea for a lot of orgs. It's part of why most orgs that do some form of devops well tend to remove a lot of concerns off the table by using stuff like AWS. Meanwhile, silozation helps people maintain some sanity and focus in larger orgs where there's so much BS work on top of your technical duties.

Sometimes the culture is short-sighted and people are at odds with goals though. I've been penalized by managers and peers for not paying enough attention to my dev duties (which were pretty meh) when I was busy helping support and sales help bring in and retain $2 million in accounts that they later named me on calls as their informal engineering MVP.

But really, being aware of what other people care about in their job is a contentious issue that I mostly think boils down to personality and general ideas of teamwork.