It failed because there is an ongoing denial that development and operations are two distinct skillsets.

If you think 10x devs are unicorns consider how much harder it is to get someone 10x at the intersection of both domains. (Personally I have never met one). You are far better off with people that can work together across the bridge, but that requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we’re not able to do that.

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vee-kay 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From someone who has managed both Developmentals team and Operations team for decades.. trust me, they are different beasts and have to be handled/tackled differently.

Expecting Devs or Ops to do both types of work, is usually asking for trouble, unless the organization is geared up from the ground up for such seamless work. It is more of a corporate problem, rather than a team working style or work expectations & behavior problem.

The same goes for Agile vs Waterfall. Agile works well if the organization is inherently (or overhauled to be) agile, otherwise it doesn't.

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DarkNova6 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But is DevOps a role or a principle?

The way I have seen it in my carreer is to have operational and development capabilities within the same team. And the idea of a „DevOps guy“ is a guy „developing operations integrations“.

As opposed to completely siloing ops nd dev.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For most companies, it is a role, the new name for IT administrators.

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dsr_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

DevOps is the practice of using modern software methods to automate the tasks of operations work. That includes using version control, templating languages and various forms of role-based configuration automation.

Anyone who thinks they can hire a devop or declare that they do devops is as deluded as 97% of the folks who claim that they are doing Agile. (If you are firmly on the other side of each of the four principles of the Agile Manifesto, you may or may not be doing great software development, but it's not Agile.)

The problem with the typical DevOps team is that there's no operations expertise.

	▲	pjmlp 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My experience is that most companies don't do Agile, and DevOps is basically sys admin that also happens to own Jenkins or similar.

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antod 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You are far better off with people that can work together across the bridge, but that requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we’re not able to do that.

Wasn't that the original goal of DevOps? Getting dev and ops not being siloes and get them collaborating? The "make devs do ops" definition seemed to come along later.

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tbrownaw 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You are far better off with people that can work together across the bridge, but that requires actual mutual trust and respect, and we’re not able to do that.

Are you claiming it's fundamentally impossible for people to get along, or just that positive interpersonal relationships can't be reliably forced at scale?

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ramoz 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, look at Kubernetes though. You have to understand both the application and the infrastructure in order to get the deployment right. Especially in any instance of having to pin the runtime to any type of resource (certain disk writing, GPUs, etc).

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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verdverm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's not a kubernetes specific issue. If you run on VMs or Edge, devs also need to know the resource requirements. If anything, k8s makes that consistent and as easy as setting a config section (assuming you have the observability to know what good values are). The default behavior I've seen is to set reqs w/o lims so you get Sche'd but not OOM'd

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firesteelrain 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My experience has been that devs don’t understand their own app resource requirements

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ramoz 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This would be considered a failure, or are you saying they don't need to?

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firesteelrain 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I am saying that in my experience they get upset when the VM or container they provision blows up because it lacks enough resources or they do not place guardrails on their app and end up getting OOMKilled.

	▲	silverquiet 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think my favorite interaction with a dev around this was when I was explaining how his java program looked like a big juicy target for the OOM killer and it had killed it in order to keep the system working. His response was, "I don't care about the system, I care about my program!" And he understood the irony of that, but it was a good reminder that we have somewhat different views and priorities.
	▲	Spivak 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And that frustration makes sense in the context of the article. Devs don't care about any of that stuff because they're customer facing, it's a distraction from their primary responsibility. It would be like asking an Amazon delivery drivers to care about oil changes and tire rotations. It's much easier to have a team of mechanics whose primary responsibility is enabling drivers to just drive and focus on delivering packages.

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tsss 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You don't need 10x developers. You just need to avoid the 1/10 multiplier of pitting separate development and operations teams against each other.