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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Depends on where you work. If you're a three-nan start up, you don't have an infrastructure or ops team. You do everything.

As well, companies who have dedicated infrastructure teams are wasting money when we reach a world where that problem is purely automated. And that's where I think we're going.

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Sure, sometimes you cant have it all, but in my experience (and hey, I am aware that I'm biased here!) I've seen ops engineers being better at programming than developers at doing ops. Another reason why I'd prefer to have 2 devels and 1 ops person is that that single ops person can bring to the table entirely different experience and point of view and that's a pure added value here.

If you think that infra teams is wasting money, then I'd say its the same case of 'serverless utopia' - when you're using 'purely automated serverless' platform you're paying way more money, because, hey, someone has to build that infrastructure and it isnt magic, its people, ops people. So what you're doing here is simply changing money buckets labels in your head and you have to now deal with a product that's tailored for everyone, instead of you specifically.

If you make a few competing 3-man startups.

One team has 2 devs and an op guy

One team has 3 devs, one of which knows enough ops to ship code

One team has 1 dev, 1 MBA, and 1 QA

One team has 1 MBA, 1 QA, 1 Marketing guy

I pick the 3 dev team, and hope each of them can fill in some of the other roles on the side (ops, marketing, qa).

Not everyone would pick the dev team, but I would.

How about I pick team with 3 ops persons I know, and all of them are better programmers than some of the professional developers I had to work with? And they also can do marketing and sales! ;) How come this approach can sound insane, but the 'full devs on' can't? I pick 2 devs 1 ops every single time, because, you know, OPS PEOPLE CAN CODE TOO as well 'good enough' as devs can do ops good enough and with 2 devs in team we've already developer skills covered. All I'm asking for is some sane approach instead of 'devs can do everything well enough'.

Not really sure I understand what you are saying.

Ops is not hard. A good dev can do it. I am a developer, not an ops person. I have written 100s of ansible scripts. I have dealt with deployments of single servers up to 100 servers across all kinds of hosts.

Your argument is "OPS PERSON CAN CODE TOO"

My argument is "DEV PERSON CAN OPS TOO"

Really labels are stupid.

I took it as a lampoon on the "Full stack dev in x" bullshit that gets tossed around. It does sound insane to expect the devs to also be marketing gurus and finance experts and legal wizards... but no one bats a eye at the idea of "PhD. ML who also knows front end JS".

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