As a developer I can freely admit that without the operations people the software I develop would not run anywhere but on my laptop.
I know as much about hardware as a cook knows about his stove and the plates the food is served on – more than the average person but waaaay less than the people producing and maintaining them.
As a devops manager that’s been both, it depends on the group. Ideally a devops group has a few former devs and a few former systems guys.
Honestly, the best devops teams have at least one guy that’s a liaison with IT who is primarily a systems guy but reports to both systems and devops. Why?
It gets you priority IT tickets and access while systems trusts him to do it right. He’s like the crux of every good devops team. He’s an IT hire paid for by the devops team budget as an offering in exchange for priority tickets.
I’ve done both, it’s just a rarity to have someone experienced enough in both to be able to cross the lines.
Those are your gems and they’ll stick around as long as you pay them decently.
Hard to find.
Because the problem is that you need
A developer
A systems guy
A social and great personality
The job is hard to hire for because those 3 in combo is rare. Many developers and systems guys have prickly personalities or specialise in their favourite part of it.
Devops spent have the option of prickly personalities because you have to deal with so many people outside your team that are prickly and that you have to sometimes give bad news to….
Eventually they’ll all be mad at you for SOMETHING…… and you have to let it slide. You have to take their anger and not take it personally…. That’s hard for most people, let alone tech workers that grew up idolising Linus torvalds, or Sheldon cooper and their “I’m so smart that I don’t need to be nice” attitudes.
Fantastic summary. For anyone wondering how to get really really valuable in IT, this is a great write-up of why my top paid people are my top paid people.
It very much depends on how close to hardware they are.
If someone is working with C# or JavaScript, they are about as knowledgeable with hardware as someone working in Excel(I know this statement is tantamount to treason but as far as hardware is concerned it’s true
But if you are working with C or rust or god forbid drivers. You probably know more than the average IT professional you might even have helped correct hardware issues.
I know this is not everyone and there’re some unicorns out there but after working with hiring managers for decades i can’t help but see cheap programmers when I see Devops. It’s ether Ops people that think they are programmers or programmers that are not good enough to get hired as Software Engineers outright at higher pay. It’s like when one person is both they can do both but not great at ether one. Devops works best when it’s a team of both dev and Ops working together. IMO
As a developer I like to mess with everything. Currently we are doing an infrastructure migration and I had to do a lot of non-development stuff to make it happen.
Honesly I find it really usefull (but not necessary) to have some understanding of the underying processes of the code I’m working with.
Simple example, our NASes are EMC2. The devs over at the company that does the software say they’re garbage, we should change them.
Mind you, these things have been running for 10 years straight 24/7, under load most of the time, and we’ve only swapped like 2 drives, total… but no, they’re garbage 🤦…
I work on a team with mainly infrastructure and operations. As one of the only people writing code on the team. I have to appreciate what IT support does to keep everything moving. I don’t know why so many programmers have to get a chip on their shoulder.
In my experience a lot of IT people are unaware of anything outside of their bubble. It’s a big problem in a lot of technical industries with people who went to school to learn a trade.
“IT people” here, operations guy who keeps the lights on for that software.
It’s been my experience developers have no idea how the hardware works, but STRONGLY believe they know more then me.
Devops is also usually more dev than ops, and it shows in the availability numbers.
Yup. Programmers who have only ever been programmers tend to act like god’s gift to this world.
As a developer I can freely admit that without the operations people the software I develop would not run anywhere but on my laptop.
I know as much about hardware as a cook knows about his stove and the plates the food is served on – more than the average person but waaaay less than the people producing and maintaining them.
20 year IT guy and I second this. Developers tend to be more troublesome than the manager wanting a shared folder for their team.
As a devops manager that’s been both, it depends on the group. Ideally a devops group has a few former devs and a few former systems guys.
Honestly, the best devops teams have at least one guy that’s a liaison with IT who is primarily a systems guy but reports to both systems and devops. Why?
It gets you priority IT tickets and access while systems trusts him to do it right. He’s like the crux of every good devops team. He’s an IT hire paid for by the devops team budget as an offering in exchange for priority tickets.
But in general, you’re absolutely right.
Am I the only guy that likes doing devops that has both dev and ops experience and insight? What’s with silosing oneself?
I’ve done both, it’s just a rarity to have someone experienced enough in both to be able to cross the lines.
Those are your gems and they’ll stick around as long as you pay them decently.
Hard to find.
Because the problem is that you need
The job is hard to hire for because those 3 in combo is rare. Many developers and systems guys have prickly personalities or specialise in their favourite part of it.
Devops spent have the option of prickly personalities because you have to deal with so many people outside your team that are prickly and that you have to sometimes give bad news to….
Eventually they’ll all be mad at you for SOMETHING…… and you have to let it slide. You have to take their anger and not take it personally…. That’s hard for most people, let alone tech workers that grew up idolising Linus torvalds, or Sheldon cooper and their “I’m so smart that I don’t need to be nice” attitudes.
Fantastic summary. For anyone wondering how to get really really valuable in IT, this is a great write-up of why my top paid people are my top paid people.
It very much depends on how close to hardware they are.
If someone is working with C# or JavaScript, they are about as knowledgeable with hardware as someone working in Excel(I know this statement is tantamount to treason but as far as hardware is concerned it’s true
But if you are working with C or rust or god forbid drivers. You probably know more than the average IT professional you might even have helped correct hardware issues.
Long story short it depends.
I know this is not everyone and there’re some unicorns out there but after working with hiring managers for decades i can’t help but see cheap programmers when I see Devops. It’s ether Ops people that think they are programmers or programmers that are not good enough to get hired as Software Engineers outright at higher pay. It’s like when one person is both they can do both but not great at ether one. Devops works best when it’s a team of both dev and Ops working together. IMO
As a developer I like to mess with everything. Currently we are doing an infrastructure migration and I had to do a lot of non-development stuff to make it happen.
Honesly I find it really usefull (but not necessary) to have some understanding of the underying processes of the code I’m working with.
Could you give an example of something related to hardware that most developers don’t know about?
Simple example, our NASes are EMC2. The devs over at the company that does the software say they’re garbage, we should change them.
Mind you, these things have been running for 10 years straight 24/7, under load most of the time, and we’ve only swapped like 2 drives, total… but no, they’re garbage 🤦…
I work on a team with mainly infrastructure and operations. As one of the only people writing code on the team. I have to appreciate what IT support does to keep everything moving. I don’t know why so many programmers have to get a chip on their shoulder.
In my experience a lot of IT people are unaware of anything outside of their bubble. It’s a big problem in a lot of technical industries with people who went to school to learn a trade.