
The First Rule of DevOps Club - johnwards
http://bridgetkromhout.com/blog/2014/11/03/the-first-rule-of-devops-club/
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drobertduke
Great article. I think part of the difficultly with the word "guys" in
particular is that it depends on the usage. Saying "hey guys" or "you guys"
when referring to mixed company is generally interpreted as gender neutral.
But talking about "ops guys" or "a guy" is definitely not gender neutral.

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gaius
"Guy" and "dude" are definitely gender-nonspecific these days, and I don't
mean just in tech. When those tapes of Tiger Woods were leaked, he called his
mistresses "dude". Language has evolved.

~~~
skywhopper
Regardless of what _you_ think about it, plenty of people disagree. As a
plural, sure "guys" can generally mean a mixed group, but as a singular noun
used in a generic sense (eg, "we need a devops guy"), I challenge you to find
any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman.

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.

~~~
e12e
I think the example in TFA is great: I'm not likely to pick up a cute devops
guy at a conference (seing as how I'm a straight male). Like it or not,
language matters and it is deeply tied to the culture in which it has evolved.
If we want to change our culture (to be less misogynistic), we'll have to
change the language we use, to facilitate the thoughts we would like to think.
It will involve trying out new terms, seeing which ones fit our meaning
without being too corny.

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?

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Rapzid
I'm not sure what culture you belong to, but my culture definitely does NOT
hate women.

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e12e
Your culture inherited a language.

~~~
e12e
I was considering an edit to the effect that misogynistic might be too strong
a word -- but on reflection I realized that many (most?) cultures have quite
recently (from the perspective of evolving language) either burned women alive
as witches, or stoned them to death. So I don't think such a qualification
would be warranted. Even if what I might have had in mind might more aptly be
described as being "merely" oppressive towards women, rather than woman-
hating.

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soyiuz
I started using "folks" much more for this reason. It is just as folksy as
"guys" but more inclusive. Thanks, folks!

~~~
dools
Yep, folks is a good go-to term I reckon.

Or peeps :)

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yeukhon
> As for those conversations I had at devopsdays with the folks who thought
> they were “just” not devops enough?

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.

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VLM
"of whom perhaps 98% were guys"

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.

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jtchang
Here is a link to the actual graph she has on her blog:
[http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-
guys/](http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/)

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.

~~~
eterm
Mostly that just seems to show that "guys" (plural) is taken as mostly neutral
but "guy" (singular) is not.

~~~
djur
That seems accurate to me.

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.

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Pxtl
I've always been bothered by the fact that so few roles on the
infrastructure/operations support side of things have an actual coherent job
title. My team has developers, testers, and a business analyst. Their jobs
have _names_. But my friends on the other side of the cube-farm in the rooms
full of half-assembled PCs? They're all just "IT guys". They might have a
proper title for their role, but nobody knows it.

~~~
brazzledazzle
To be honest it sounds more like you haven't gotten to know them and their
roles.

~~~
Pxtl
Oh I know their roles - there's the guy who owns all the images, the guy who
handles file-system permissions, the guy who handles firewalls and virus
scanners, etc. They have roles and specializations and whatnot, what they lack
is a nice verb-oriented job title. Managers manage, developers develop,
testers test, analysts analyze... they support and maintain and operate, but
we don't call them a nice verby name like "operators", we just associate them
with the noun Information Technology and so they get the abbreviation and
suffix "I.T. Guys".

~~~
T-Winsnes
They sound like sysadmins to me :)

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rdlecler1
If person/people wasn't a two syllable word would we use that instead? Maybe
"peeps" needs to be adopted.

~~~
ghaff
They are used a bit. "IT people just don't get the problem" sounds fine to my
ear and I see that kind of construction. (Which has a slightly different
nuance from IT doesn't get it.) It's a bit clinical and impersonal but
something like that is what I'd probably use in an official marketing doc.
Peeps, on the other hand, is very slangy and at least today carries the
implications of acquaintances, as least as I've seen it used. As someone else
mentioned, folks isn't a bad clearly general-neutral, casual term. And I use
it from time to time in more casual writing.

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mindweather
It's worth noting that this article is by Bridget
[[http://bridgetkromhout.com](http://bridgetkromhout.com)], not Julia
[[http://jvns.ca/](http://jvns.ca/)].

Both of them are awesome. ;)

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jheriko
this is only going to go away if people use gender neutral terms naturally...
its sad but true.

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.

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aftbit
Y'all.

~~~
djur
"Y'all" and "folks" carry a bit of a cultural connotation. "Y'all" is
identified with the South, and "folks" has a somewhat rural (folksy!) sound to
it. I grew up without "y'all" and with "folks" almost exclusively referring to
parents and grandparents, so I don't feel very natural using them.

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).

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jldugger
This is really simple, people. s/ops guys/ops team/g.

Done.

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Squab
Anything it takes to get more women in these type of fields is a good idea,
imo. There's a slight perspective difference that I find really beneficial
when working with women in tech. Besides the other obvious benefits.

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Ronsenshi
I was expecting something more on topic.

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.

~~~
Agathos
The first rule of devops club is welcome to devops club.

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.)

~~~
VLM
Sixth rule: suggesting bespoke one-off installations of "just this one
library" in production results in the "burning lye" scene.

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.

~~~
Ronsenshi
Or maybe simplify:

"You do not talk about DevOps guys"?

