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by KaiserPro 4120 days ago
So this is the thing. There are three things that really go against a true "devop" system:

1) cost.

Ops are cheaper than devops, sometimes twice as much. Yes yes, flexibility. But thats a misnomer. If your dev teams are doing donkey sysadmin work, because they don't have the experience, or are up all hours fixing things, you're going to endup with a high staff turn over.

2) division of labour

As a company grows, they can employ more and more specialist staff. This gives them a competative edge as they are able to make nuanced decisions based on skill, or experience. A decent storage admin will be able to build a storage system that will scale relaibly, cheaply and with less downtime than someone who is not a specialist.

3) burn out.

A human is not designed to multitask 14 hours a day. Coding, testing, supporting, infrastructure procuring, for anything other than the smallest company is too much for a single role.

There are great things that come from a devop "culture"; greater personal autonomy. However like all things, its not one size fits all. There is a great deal of arrogance where people assume that a sysadmin never automate anything. or that they can't program.

They can and do, you know why? because they want to carry on searching ebay, scamming $someone boasting about network speed, or just plain getting shitfaced.

1 comments

I was with you until "because they want to carry on searching ebay, scamming $someone boasting about network speed, or just plain getting shitfaced.", but I'm guessing you're just being cheeky.
I was thinking it was a BOFH ("Bastard Operator From Hell") reference. [0] The BOFH is a fictional sysadmin who is worse than any you have ever had, in entertaining ways. He basically does exactly the things the OP mentioned, while dealing with clueless management, undeliable vendors, and a Sith Apprentice^W^WYoung Coworker who learned well, and is constantly trying to stab him in the back. He's like a mix between Catbert and Wally. ;)

0: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/27/bofh_2015_episode_2/

I was bending the truth a tinybit.

The idea is that a good sysadmin is an idle sysadmin. (having offloaded tech support to the juniors)

unless they are playing with new stuff.