Is Ops a Bullshit Job?

Not sure what experience OP has, but I’ve never been on a team of devs who were actually interested in doing anything beyond writing code. It’s typically like pulling teeth just to get them to accept a minuscule portion of responsibility for delivery.

Part of the problem is that when ops is doing their job well, nobody notices. You get a party when the regular devs ship a big new feature, but no-one really celebrates when you have five nines of availability for the year.

Personally I’m a big advocate for devs doing a rotation on an ops-focused team so they better understand the full picture of professional software development. Hopefully they learn that it takes more than code in an editor to create a product.

As someone with thirty years of ops work under my belt, I feel compelled to say a few words in reply to this article.

No, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And you are the one making it whole.

I will say that it can definitely very much be a bullshit job if your org structure is optimized for bullshit. Like 80% of QA jobs are the result of hierarchical bullshit pipelines, and certainly no small percentage of dev roles too.