The core insight of DevOps, at the very beginning, was that when people need to carry the pager for the code they write, they write code that won’t wake them up at Oh My God, What The Fuck O’Clock after it falls over in production again. Everything since - DORA, all of it - has been in service of this one idea that aligning software discipline with quality of life consequences makes better software.
It’s an idea that should be everywhere and in everything.
@cks My slightly adjacent cynical view is that as soon as the realization that code had consequences really took root, it basically served as an incentive marketing campaign for SAAS based solutions that let you offload those risks to companies and "devops" rapidly became "contract management in a terminal window".
@owen had some related thoughts about this but a quick search didn't find them.
@mhoye @cks I do wish I remembered where I picked up that framing; it's not mine, but it rung so loudly through me I've had trouble shutting up about it.
However, I might disagree that, as practiced, modern devops has a damned thing to do with what _developers_ (or, for that matter, the few remaining ops folk) want. Most devops implementations I've seen are firmly top-down exercises, facilitated by a few true believers but largely funded by the host organization.
@mhoye @cks The mean "devops transformation" reallocates work without removing any, and reduces headcount. _Devops teams_, where they exist, are almost universally in a lower total team comp band than the ops team whose work they inherited, and given how underpaid a lot of ops teams were to start with, that's saying something.
That's not to say that individual devops engineers are necessarily underpaid; I've known some very well compensated folks in that space.
Who work, functionally, alone.
mhoye
Chris Siebenmann
Owen
Nik