> Many small companies don't have a large wage bill (outside SV), and don't have lots of devs or a sysadmin, instead they tend to have devs who do the sysadmin too.

It's exactly those kinds of companies that Heroku is aimed at. I can hack being a devops. I don't want to:

— I don't know what I don't know, which has huge ramifications for both security and uptime

— I have plenty of opportunities available to me and am not interested in being on call all the time. Your business could not reasonably pay me enough to answer the phone at 3 am.

— One day of heads-down product development can easily create several thousand dollars in value (or more) for a company. When I am interrupted with server patches, setting up new servers, or debugging a failed deploy process, and you throw a meeting or two in the mix, I'm downgraded to shipping a few bug fixes that day.

Any competent executive wants his key developers heads-down shipping features and should not expect them to manage devops anymore than he would expect them to interrupt their day to balance the accounting books. It's a context switch. Throwing money at Heroku makes perfect sense here.