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.
I know we’re just having fun, but in the future consider adding the word “some” to statements about groups. It’s just one word, but it adds a lot of nuance and doesn’t make the joke less funny.
That 90’s brand of humor of “X group does Y” has led many in my generation to think in absolutes and to get polarized as a result. I’d really appreciate your help to work against that for future generations.
I’ve always found this weird. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action. It certainly helps when you want to optimize memory access for speed etc.
I genuinely do know both sides of the coin. But I do know that the majority of my fellow developers at work most certainly have no clue about how computers work under the hood, or networking for example.
I find it weird because, to be good at software development (and I don’t mean, following what the computer science methodology tells you, I mean having an idea of the best way to translate an idea into a logical solution that can be applied in any programming language, and most importantly how to optimize your solution, for example in terms of memory access etc) requires an understanding of the underlying systems. That if you write software that is sending or receiving network packets it certainly helps to understand how that works, at least to consider the best protocols to use.
. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action.
There’s so many layers of abstractions that it becomes impossible to know everything.
Years ago, I dedicated a lot of time understanding how bytes travel from a server into your router into your computer. Very low-level mastery.
That education is now trivia, because cloud servers, cloudflare, region points, edge-servers, company firewalls… All other barriers that add more and more layers of complexity that I don’t have direct access to but can affect the applications I build. And it continues to grow.
Add this to the pile of updates to computer languages, new design patterns to learn, operating system and environment updates…
This is why engineers live alone on a farm after they burn out.
It’s not feasible to understand everything under the hood anymore. What’s under the hood grows faster than you can pick it up.
yeah i wish it was a requirement that you’re nerdy enough to build your own computer or at least be able to install an OS before joining SWE industry. the non-nerds are too political and can’t figure out basic shit.
I like informing yourself about the note taking app you’re writing with a little more. It makes it a bit more obvious that it’s kind of obvious but can have many advantages.
Personally though I don’t really see upside of building a computer as you could also just research things and not build it or vice versa. (Maybe it’s good for looking at bug reports?)
A 30 minute explanation on how CPUs work that I recently got to listen in on was likely more impactful on my C/assembly programming than building my own computer was.
you wouldn’t want somebody that hates animals to become a veterinarian just because of money-lust. the animals would suffer, the field as a whole, too. maybe they start buying up veterinary offices and squeeze the business for everything they can, resulting in worse outcomes- more animals dying and suffering, workers get shorted on benefits and pay.
people chasing money ruin things. we want an industry full of people that want to actually build things.
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 do agree that they’re out of date, but that wasn’t their point, their software somehow doesn’t like the NASes, so they had to look into where the problem was. But, their first thought was “let’s tell them they’re no good and tell them which ones to buy so we wouldn’t have to look at the code”.
My reasoning was, they’d have to send someone over to do tests and build the project on site, install and test, since we couldn’t give any of those NASes to them for them to work on the problem, and they’d rather not do that, since it’s a lot more work and it’s time consuming.
Yeah, they tried that a few times, the software would glitch and Windows would either BSOD or just freeze (had something to do with how their HASP dongle license communicated with the software and the drivers it used, nothing to do with our issue whatsoever, lol). In the end, they had to come down and debug the issue on a separate rig and install. We just couldn’t have those interruptions in production.
“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 QA person I despise those programmers.
“Sure buddy it works on your machine, but your machine isn’t going to be put into the production environment. It’s not working on mine, fix it!”
Thus, Docker was born.
“Works on my machine, ship the machine.”
My answer is usually “I don’t care how well it runs on your windows machine. Our deployments are on Linux”.
I’m a old developer that has done a lot of admin over the years out of necessity.
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.
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.
Apologies for the tangent:
I know we’re just having fun, but in the future consider adding the word “some” to statements about groups. It’s just one word, but it adds a lot of nuance and doesn’t make the joke less funny.
That 90’s brand of humor of “X group does Y” has led many in my generation to think in absolutes and to get polarized as a result. I’d really appreciate your help to work against that for future generations.
Totally optional. Thank you
I’ve always found this weird. I think to be a good software developer it helps to know what’s happening under the hood when you take an action. It certainly helps when you want to optimize memory access for speed etc.
I genuinely do know both sides of the coin. But I do know that the majority of my fellow developers at work most certainly have no clue about how computers work under the hood, or networking for example.
I find it weird because, to be good at software development (and I don’t mean, following what the computer science methodology tells you, I mean having an idea of the best way to translate an idea into a logical solution that can be applied in any programming language, and most importantly how to optimize your solution, for example in terms of memory access etc) requires an understanding of the underlying systems. That if you write software that is sending or receiving network packets it certainly helps to understand how that works, at least to consider the best protocols to use.
But, it is definitely true.
There’s so many layers of abstractions that it becomes impossible to know everything.
Years ago, I dedicated a lot of time understanding how bytes travel from a server into your router into your computer. Very low-level mastery.
That education is now trivia, because cloud servers, cloudflare, region points, edge-servers, company firewalls… All other barriers that add more and more layers of complexity that I don’t have direct access to but can affect the applications I build. And it continues to grow.
Add this to the pile of updates to computer languages, new design patterns to learn, operating system and environment updates…
This is why engineers live alone on a farm after they burn out.
It’s not feasible to understand everything under the hood anymore. What’s under the hood grows faster than you can pick it up.
yeah i wish it was a requirement that you’re nerdy enough to build your own computer or at least be able to install an OS before joining SWE industry. the non-nerds are too political and can’t figure out basic shit.
This is like saying before you can be a writer, you need to understand latin and the history of language.
weird, i studied latin and the history of language just because i found it interesting. i am always seeking to improve my writing skills tho.
Before you can be a writer, you need to sharpen your own pencil.
I like informing yourself about the note taking app you’re writing with a little more. It makes it a bit more obvious that it’s kind of obvious but can have many advantages.
Personally though I don’t really see upside of building a computer as you could also just research things and not build it or vice versa. (Maybe it’s good for looking at bug reports?)
A 30 minute explanation on how CPUs work that I recently got to listen in on was likely more impactful on my C/assembly programming than building my own computer was.
you wouldn’t want somebody that hates animals to become a veterinarian just because of money-lust. the animals would suffer, the field as a whole, too. maybe they start buying up veterinary offices and squeeze the business for everything they can, resulting in worse outcomes- more animals dying and suffering, workers get shorted on benefits and pay.
people chasing money ruin things. we want an industry full of people that want to actually build things.
I don’t really see the connection to my comment.
In this example wouldn’t the programmer be more of a pharmacist? (The animal body the computer and its brain the user?)
Your statement is not wrong, it just seems unrelated.
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 🤦…
Accurate!
Developers are frequently excited by the next hot thing or how some billionaire tech companies operate.
I’m guilty of seeing something that was last updated in 2019 and having a look of disgust.
Well, at least you admit it, not everyone does.
I do agree that they’re out of date, but that wasn’t their point, their software somehow doesn’t like the NASes, so they had to look into where the problem was. But, their first thought was “let’s tell them they’re no good and tell them which ones to buy so we wouldn’t have to look at the code”.
That sounds extremely lazy. I’d expect more from a dev team.
Me too, but apparently, that wasn’t the case.
My reasoning was, they’d have to send someone over to do tests and build the project on site, install and test, since we couldn’t give any of those NASes to them for them to work on the problem, and they’d rather not do that, since it’s a lot more work and it’s time consuming.
Couldn’t they remotely connect to them?
Yeah, they tried that a few times, the software would glitch and Windows would either BSOD or just freeze (had something to do with how their HASP dongle license communicated with the software and the drivers it used, nothing to do with our issue whatsoever, lol). In the end, they had to come down and debug the issue on a separate rig and install. We just couldn’t have those interruptions in production.