Comment by mr_tristan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr_tristan | Hacker News Reader

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> It seems that in many places, "DevOps" is all Ops and no Dev.

This was definitely my experience at my last couple of jobs. At my last one they "scaled out their DevOps team" by hiring tons of juniors with next to no software development background. And then they "empowered" teams by assigning the juniors to each dev group. As a result, we ended up having to train them how to do their core jobs, which... went about as well as you'd think.

Eventually, there was an attempt to shift everyone to kubernetes. They had a special "DevOps" team build a layer on top of it to handle the non-kubernetes aspects of deployment as well, and somehow manage them together using Helm. If you're wondering "what the hell does that mean", well, it turned out nobody really knew. These "DevOps" engineers didn't really seem to understand kubernetes core concepts, and just ended up hacking away with some scripts on top of terraform delivered via Helm until something got configured. It was incredibly slow to deliver, hard to use, and I just stayed away from it until some exec threw down the mandates. (And then everyone started quitting because it was an absolute disaster.)

Ultimately, these are really stories about bad management, not really anything to do with DevOps. But that's how these things roll - some new hot concept comes to town, and bad managers try to adopt the term, without really understanding it.

What you just described is the exact same reason I started working on https://stacktape.com 3 years ago.

When doing the market research, I talked to ~150-200 companies (mostly SMBs). Everyone was trying to "do DevOps". But the complexity of running a Kubernetes cluster (or a custom AWS setup using ECS) is just overwhelming for most of the teams.

In most cases, the DevOps/platform team requires atleast 2-3 experienced people that have successfully done this before.

Considering how few experienced DevOps people with such kind of experience are currently available on the market, it's no surprise that only the "coolest" companies around get to hire these people. These successful companies then write blogposts about how successful they were.

And the circle starts all over again. Less successful companies follow them and (in most cases) fail.

Most of these companies don't admit it, or don't admit it soon enough. They also don't write blogposts about their failures.

From my experience and research, roughly 70-80% of companies fail to deliver the expected results (or deliver them with order of magnitue more effort than initially expected). Yet 90-95% of the content we get to read about these topics is overwhelmingly positive.

PS.: If you don't have an A-tier DevOps teams, check out https://stacktape.com. I promise it will make your life easier.

It's not always bad managers or management. The fancy new hotness gets pushed onto them by smooth-talking evangelists. For every criticism or question they have a snazzy little quip and retort that makes you look like an idiot for not knowing "the obviousness" of your errors and how this new fad/tech/framework/methodology solves it. And if that retort doesn't work, they just tell you "it's standard in the industry, dunno what you want me to tell you".

And from the outside, this all just looks like resume padding and job-security. Devops is the new priesthood, subscribe or be reduced to irrelevance by config warriors.

The fancy new hotness gets pushed onto them by smooth-talking evangelists.

Gets pushed onto them top-down. This means there is no real competition, no real empiricism, no real comparative merit involved in the switch.

How should never be imposed top-down. It's only goals and how success is measured which should be top-down. The classic example of this was when Jeff Bezos mandated that all Amazon software systems should be accessible by APIs over the internal network, or else one would be fired.

Whenever I've seen How imposed top down, I've only seen the lower level managers talk about how they could put off and passive aggressively stymie the initiative.

Wow sounds like exactly what happened at a $previousCompany-1 and exactly what prompted me to leave.

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