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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm... I wonder if everyone followed this advice, would it have the side effect of decreasing pay for the high profile jobs (like API evangelist, someone working on Android, etc) relative to the less public jobs (Build Guy, adwords engineer)?

I'm guessing so. That'd be an interesting outcome.

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The "build guy" thing stung for me, as it's been much of my career. Shit rolls downhill, man. It's a job that only gets recognized when it goes wrong.

I've never been the "build guy" full time, but I have been the developer who enjoyed/took care of the process/version control/scripting. It is worth saying that there is a great series of best practices, etc, that are worth documenting (and publicizing) around builds. (Even if it is hard to justify investment in improving builds sometimes.)

I've certainly enjoyed the technical challenge of bringing in best practices and better tools, and I've really enjoyed playing the emissary between dev and ops (a co-worker once called me a "one man DevOps team"). But the fact that there's no visibility until things go wrong - there's a real problem with the responsibility/authority ratio in that role.

I suppose there are still routes to visibility if you can develop and release tools to support testing and building. There is probably room to blog too. But you probably need to work quite hard on visibility, the natural state is the invisible.

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