Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

> I can't see the need for dedicated DevOps resources going away any time soon.

But is what you're describing just.... "ops" without any of the "dev"? I'm not saying that there is not a need for dedicated infrastructure and operations teams at a certain size (and in some industries), but that's not an excuse for devs to feel like they can chuck a new feature over the wall and say "Well, I'm done my job. Please run it and make sure it doesn't break".

View on HN

No silly, that's what the QA team are for! Anyway, our DevOps guy spent probably most of his time "developing" - just not application-level features.

Agreed. It also goes back to the sys admin problem which devops optimised in that the Dev team owns there code in production.

I've seen success with a dedicated devops member on a team but having a dedicated devops team just introduces delays and latency when fixing pipelines or releasing. The very same problem we had with sys admins.

At a certain point, hiring dedicated Devops frees up x number of developers to continue to develop features depending on the amount of time each developer is spending on performing those devops duties. It’s just another area management can split up job roles to capture more value and allow deeper specialization among professionals.

Sure, but if you're hiring people in a different role that does all of the ops work for developers, this isn't "devops". This is just "ops".

Sounds like a terminology issue then, I consider it "devops" because they're mostly writing code that goes into our git repo etc. etc., they still have to do PRs and code reviews etc. But the code is to handle deployments, not to implement features.

Yes: the terminology problem is the is you are using the terminology wrong.

DevOps is about cross-functional teams, and has been co-opted by vendors to sell products. And delivery of software is the ultimate feature: without it, nothing of value can be produced.

Then everybody else I've worked with over the last 6 or 7 years is also using it wrongly.

Quite likely.

Well then we're just getting into debates about what determines the "correct" meanings of word. I read the original article and most of the comments here using my understanding of the term, and it made sense that way...

(not to beat a dead horse, but I just finished some interviews I was involved in as an advisor and the term DevOps was used a lot in all of them. And in every single case the term was used exactly the way I've understood to mean - i.e., DevOps engineers are those who primarily look after the CI/CD pipeline, generally don't write application-level code or develop features, but do very much spend the majority of their time developing scripts and tools to enable CI/CD).

I thougt the "dev" part was because the "ops" were using code to build the infrastructure.

In my experience that leads to meh code if the "devops" comes from a former sysadmin, or meh infrastructure if s/he comes from the dev side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com