Trunk-and-branches model for scaling infrastructure organizations

“Innovation teams shouldn’t be burdened with operational concerns” Surprising how prevalent this attitude still is. It leads to large Centralized ops teams are inevitably going to be a bottleneck. If developers need to routinely create tickets with some other team to do get their work done then clearly the org is heading the wrong way. the org needs to invest in more self-service automation and ops training the developers with a mindset of reducing the size and responsibilities of their ops team rather than just hiring more ops which makes the problem worse.

> we hired an earlier career engineer whose initial project was to handle all incoming provisioning requests

So many places do this and it's such a waste. Early career engineers have the most to gain from high-quality experience, yet they're the most likely to be assigned shit-shoveling tasks.

I've interviewed a lot of candidates with 2-4 years experience at prestigious tech companies who have no technical accomplishments they're proud of.

Take two new grads with similar attitudes and academics. Put one on a team that assigns them interesting, challenging tasks that stimulate their growth. Put the other on a team that assigns them an endless queue of "service provisioning requests." Come back in ten years to see where they're at in their careers.