The First Rule of DevOps Club
bridgetkromhout.com
bridgetkromhout.com
There isn't a good mixed company informal term.
In a professional setting, it's important to use language carefully. And in a situation like this where you have evidence that at least some people feel using "guy" and "guys" is a poor choice, and where there are plenty of equivalent alternatives ("folks" is my go-to), the only reason to use "guy" is to be a jerk.
Don't be a jerk.
You: > find any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman.
It's not supposed to primarily denote a woman, GP specifically said it's non-specific.
That said, I disagree. I think guy is gender specific, typically. I also have very, very seldom heard a woman called "dude." Certainly the non-specificity isn't universal.
As an aside: what is a devops guy/girl/individual anyway? Isn't the core of devops (as opposed to system administration/system development) a holistic approach where everyone has a responsibility for implementing the system as a whole, including both development and day-to-day operations? Hence:DevOps?
Stop with you condescending bs
It does bring up an interesting subject: what is a good colloquial or informal way of specifying a plural of an individual unit for these sorts of things without resulting to annoying chaining of multiple words like "guys/girls" or "men/women"? DevOps "guys" is out. DevOps "people" doesn't use individual units. DevOps "monkeys" or "ninjas" are kind of gender neutral but sound very...stupid. DevOps-ers sounds awkward. I guess you could go with something like "gurus" but not every hire is going to be a guru.
I suppose the safest option is "DevOps engineers", but that adds some additional formality and isn't so colloquial or simple.
"Folks" is probably the closest thing you'll get though.
I'm a dude, he's a dude, she's a dude, we're all dudes, hey.
Think of it this way. When you call a male-identifying person "guy" it affirms their gender. When you call a non-male-identifying person "guy" it passively denies theirs. "Guy" is not gender nonspecific, and when you use it that way, it has the potential to make a non-male person feel like their gender identity is being assimilated into your idea of a "guy", whatever that is.
Another thought to leave you with. "Guy" == male when the gender of the person it refers to has not been established. Suppose someone tells you "I saw this guy biking down the street the other day..." Do you ever imagine that they're talking about a woman?
Or peeps :)
As a junior, my vision of devops is someone who is guarding staging and production, and release management, assuming you have a mature self-service platform for developers. As for why people feel they are not devops enough I think it is important to realize that devops is mainly a culture change (quoting from a coworker). Your devops can be your system admin. Your developers should know how to handle some operations, because they will have to work with the SRE/devops. There should be a structure, a list of runbooks and procedures in place. Automation is only a syntactic sugar of blueprints, documentations, plans (recovery, backup, SLA, etc). DevOps should be the people that say NO to developer and NO to business and NO to upper management when you know something won't go well (e.g. there is a strict release/deployment requirements). So a mature DevOps team is essentially jack-of-all-trade go-to team. You write a lot, you talk a lot, you plan a lot, you maintain a lot, and you innovate a lot (looking at the big picture). Whether you are running a startup or an enterprise, automation is the last thing on your to-do list. To claify my last point: sure you should build your VPC and security groups using cloudformation if you are on AWS. But before doing that, you obviously need to start off with a discussion.
In my extensive non-coastal observation of ops centers, mostly at very large companies, the male-female ratio in ops is much more "normal" than the dev group ratio (which is often all male). Then again I've never worked with anyone who would go to a ops-conference (what do you guys talk about?). This may result in some audience bias, if the audience at a con is entirely mid/upper mgmt (probably all male), or marketing people and startup founders trying to sell stuff to ops mgmt. She might be seeing a mgmt glass ceiling and thinking it has something to do with ops at the bottom of the pyramid.
I have observed that the more competently run the ops dept (procedures, decent mgmt, staffing by butts on seats 24x7 instead of on call) the more likely you'll see women working there. I worked at a huge telco that had an all female fiber ops center during 3rd shift some part of the week, for example. Its not too far fetched that a good indication you have professional adults running a place instead of kids, is having female ops team members. Counting them is probably not the dumbest possible metric for a quick eval of a company.
The important thing we as a community need to understand is that there are terms that can be very gender specific and at the same time being gender neutral depending on the context.
I do try to avoid 'guys' and 'dudes' in professional contexts, for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but it can be difficult to remember. Most of my closest friends are women, and 'hey guys' and 'hey dudes' are common greetings even when the group is all women (other than me). I don't usually address individuals by anything other than their name, but 'dude' is occasionally used for either a man or a woman, while 'guy' in the singular is clearly only for men.
I mean, 'guy' is male-identified to the point that it's used as an indicator -- "guy stuff" versus "girl stuff", etc. It's not a huge stretch to perceive the plural as only quasi-neutral, addressing women by assumption rather than by explicit inclusion.
Both of them are awesome. ;)
i've always used guys to mean 'people' because there is no natural slang alternative. i'm now rethinking this, but its hard to retrain years of doing what i thought was correct in this manner.
although in hindsight its so obvious i should have seen it :/
but at the same time nothing jumps to mind as an alternative. this is definitely problem, but i'm not sure how to actually fix it.
In chat, I'll use "folx". It's a private, unexplainable joke that also helps me feel a little less silly (by being a lot sillier).
Done.
First rule of the Fight Club is:
> You do not talk about Fight Club
Kind of expected something along those lines with more emphasis on the actual DevOps instead of meta talk about community.
Still, interesting read.
The second rule of devops club is welcome to devops club!
The third rule of devops club: someone yells stop, goes limp, tests don't pass: the deployment is over. Roll back to your last known good Docker environment.
Fourth rule: only two gu^H^H devops professionals to a deployment.
Fifth rule: one deployment at a time.
Sixth rule: no bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production.
Seventh rule: deployments will go on as long as they have to.
And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first night at devops club, you have to push something into production.
(Some of these are more practical than others, I'll admit. Please don't practice rule 8, and I'm not sure what rule 7 even means.)
And the on topic first rule, if you've ever read the book, is the first rule of devops guys is don't talk about devops "guys" in the presence of someone of the female persuasion.
"You do not talk about DevOps guys"?