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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, ever since devops became a thing they’ve placed themselves in this position where they’re somehow better than the application developers, even though until a few years ago those same developers were doing the exact same things.

I swear, sysadmins were annoying as an application developer, but devops is something else.

People with one year of actual work experience get hired as devops, and have all the privileges I would need to fix their mistakes, but I can’t, because I’m an ‘application developer’. So instead you end up teaching them how to do their job.

I’m not salty at all.

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DevOps is a set of practices not a role. I do Ops, practicing DevOps, and I serve my programmers. My job is to ensure they stay happy. If they're not happy about something in the production pipeline that's on me. I work hard to make sure that I'm their Jesus Christ for all things infrastructure.

If your programmers aren't delighted with you, I'd say you the Ops person is not practicing DevOps or you have a buy-in problem to DevOps practices at an organization level.

I love this take.

My previous role had my title as "DevOps Engineer" but it always rubbed me the wrong way. I was just an Operations Engineer with a focus on making my developers' jobs easier, in any way I could. Having that as my North Star kept me honest about the work I was doing versus considering the role more like Operations Engineer v2.0.

In the Silicon Valley, at least, DevOps seemed to be (seems to be?) sort of in vogue; I think it's important to keep its core qualities of bridging Development and Operations in mind as opposed to just shifting an existing position's title in an attempt to attract talent.

Preach!!

And this should extend throughout the organization. If Architecture or Security or any other group is making your life miserable, they too should be DevOps'ing, working closely with you, caring about your frustrations that only they can fix. Sadly there are still so many silos left to break up.

Agree, a job title of “DevOps Engineer” is an organizational smell for me.

Most people with such a title are actually something like “Automation Engineers”, “Infrastructure Engineers”, “Operations Engineers”, “Site Reliability Engineers”, etc, that are involved in a DevOps “process”, “initiative”, “culture”, etc.

Ah the classic ivory tower argument where some “other class” of engineers are universally inept, but not “my class!”

You can write the same screed full of generalizations from the perspective of any job title: a devops person would lament the fresh-out-of-bootcamp “application developers” who have no idea how systems work together so write SQL queries that retrieve a million rows, one at a time. “Works on my local!”

Pretty sure GP was bristling at the reverse happening. We must keep the developers from screwing up the important computers.

Saying the emperor has no clothes is not white tower thinking,

I completely agree. Access to those things should be given to those qualified to work with them, not based on an arbitrary role designation.

I’m sorry you’ve had some bad experiences but not everyone is like that.

However it’s also misguided to assume that specialities don’t exist. You can have infrastructure guys, developers, security folk; and there will be overlap between each role but it’s impossible to be the master of each trade.

I agree that arrogance is an unpleasant trait but arrogance can take many forms, rudeness to colleagues, or over assuming ones own technical capabilities in adjacent fields.

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