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Comment by sto_hristo | Hacker News Reader

I simply quit a job with 2 months after they pinned devops duties in addition to software development. And i've yet to be proven that this can be done by a single person.

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I work in a team of 45 devs. We develop, deploy and maintain our code. Maintenance is done on rotation, everyone is responsible for deployment of their code all the way to prod and we maintain the CI/CD pipelines ourselves. K8s is the only managed service we use on aws. On Azure, we manage our own K8s. It's not "a single person" but as a team, we all do it.

So, all 45 of you are modifying yaml templates and dockerfiles?

That sounds like a spectacular duplication of effort to me.

The problem with anything like this where one person has multiple “roles” is that it is hard to excel at one or the other and very very easy to not be good at both.

Unless you are given time to spend on both roles independently then you end up cutting corners, it is inevitable as one or the other will be more important at one time and you can’t be in two places at once!

> The problem with anything like this where one person has multiple “roles” is that it is hard to excel at one or the other and very very easy to not be good at both.

In the immortal words of Ron Swanson - never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.

Ive worked in places that have done just that. Essentially developed who are operations but focused on dev. They hated being on call, anxiety went through the roof, burn out and eventually would leave the company, it was rolled out to a subset team and not all.

These were seasoned devs the company had lost and now the codebase is dysfunctional and has put the project/roadmap at risk and company revenue.

The thought of having to do Ops, write code and be on call gives me anxiety and panic attacks.

I'm curious, in your example, what do you consider "devops duties"?

It can but it’s not very practical

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