
Karojisatsu – Leaving the DevOps Community - sethvargo
http://itrevolution.com/karojisatsu/
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brazzy
I guess that's one danger of work and hobby being the same thing: when you get
tired or run into problems, you may have nothing to turn to.

~~~
alphonse23
that might be a pretty accurate assessment of Carlo -- from reading his
tweets, it sounds like he was juggling multiple realities -- I knew him
actually -- I really wish he waiting long enough for someone to talk him out
of it...

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mcfunley
I'm just now putting two and two together, but I now realize that I saw Carlos
talk about his haproxyctl project at the Pasadena meetup last month. He
projected enthusiasm and earnestness in a way that had me grinning from ear to
ear. This is a major bummer.

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Animats
That's the price of the lean organization. Some must die for the bottom line.

~~~
arcosdev
Not sure why you're being downvoted....this is a direct result of profit
first, 10x bullshit.

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olalonde
Probably because he is 1) singling out the lean movement for no apparent
reason 2) being hyperbolic (except for the odd psychopath, I'm fairly sure the
vast majority of business owners do not believe "some must die for the bottom
line").

~~~
ealexhudson
A 'lean' organisation is more likely to rely on a small number of individuals,
or one person, to manage a large deployment. The devops approach gives a
single good engineer a large amount of leverage in terms of deployment, but
that will then bring a commensurate increase in pressure on that individual. I
think it's a fair criticism of lean principles that it increases the pressure
on individuals.

I agree most business owners wouldn't believe anything close to "some must
die" \- however, I do believe that inaction is almost as bad, and I do think
mental health / wellness doesn't get anything like enough thought or
attention. The harder you work your staff, and the more pressure you heap on
them, the more you have to focus on them as individuals and support them
better.

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yeukhon
> In our industry a lot of young IT professionals use the term “burnout” as a
> badge of honor.

That's me, but I feel the burnout at the same time. On one hand it is me who
is addicted to working, and on the other hand I just can't start thinking that
doing more would allow me to work on something more interesting, like a mad
scientist trying to solve some mystery. But half of what I do are break-fixes,
and can't even start working on real devops, gaming changing practice. The
culture - devops, building practice is part of my job, but often I don't see
me doing that...my responsibility exceeds my title, my role right now, which
is great for career growth. I don't know man...

I'm 23.

~~~
devonkim
As someone almost ten years older that has been basically in the same
position, I think you have to challenge yourself sufficiently to grow if your
job itself won't challenge you appropriately. If your organization is too
uncaring to change, life is too short to deal with bad jobs. But it is always
worth working towards skills that will get you a better job. That is, do the
minimum to say employed but put the real focus into getting to a saner,
smarter company. I say appropriate because to me the whole point of modern
devops is about having the entire organization work smarter, not harder, and
together on the right things to be able to stay sane.

Where I am, I know that the wider organization is completely not capable of
actually fixing itself (when your network team is still manually running ping
and tcproute instead of having monitoring galore from every link to another
either with vendor tools or something crude like Nagios, you're too far behind
to ever catch up). So, even if my corner of the devops world is completely
flawless, I will be basically handing off tickets to another team 100% of the
time while my applications that depend upon them suffer the consequences.

According to my boss I already am changing how others do things by showing the
power of solid, modern tooling and instrumentation but it's awful hard to tell
that any of it makes a difference when you're doing 20-hour days 3 days in a
row all for issues you only diagnosed, none that you are directly responsible
for.

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contingencies
In Australia they have free phone numbers for people to call who are in
distress for whatever reason. Don't they have that in the US?

~~~
frankwiles
Yes the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 800-273-8255.

Stories and situations like this is one of the reasons I accepted a board
position at
[http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/](http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/).
It's very preventable with the right treatment at the right time.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Not only that, if you search Google for how to commit suicide, Google returns
as special large-format card with that info:

[https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png](https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png)

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DennisP
I just read _The Phoenix Project_ , the book mentioned at the end of the
article. It's an entertaining look at what DevOps is supposed to be like,
based on things happening at various real enterprises.

The main character takes over an IT organization that's way behind on
deadlines and experiencing one major disaster after another. He gradually
transforms it with better practices, until everybody's living a stress-free,
balanced life, _and_ they're delivering much better results to the business.

These two things don't need to be in conflict.

~~~
coleca
Exactly. I've been a big fan of John Willis for awhile and the challenge that
he, Gene Kim, and others have taken on to fix enterprise IT culture should be
commended. They hit the nail on the head when they state that DevOps isn't
about Puppet and Chef or the latest hotness on Github, but that the key to it
is culture. The tools can help automate some processes, but without fixing the
underlying culture it's missing the point.

The Phoenix Project should be required reading for all IT professionals,
especially senior leadership. If you've worked in IT for any amount of time
you'd quickly recognize all the characters and wondered who from your
organization told all your dirty laundry to Gene.

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fadzlan
Which part of it says leaving the DevOps Community?

This is more like leaving the world?

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click170
Its irritating that as soon as I start scrolling, a little popup appears
asking me to subscribe to the site. The popup is out of view on mobile
devices, leading to an experience where this page just turns dark gray after I
try and scroll.

