
Ask HN: Why was system admin re-branded as devops? - amazonavocado
I am thirty seven years old who has been in the field for 11 years on-and-off. This just gives you only an idea of when I started. I have experience in writing web software for various commercial applications. I <i>don&#x27;t</i> have experience with scalable design, unit testing, continuous development, or agile development methodologies. I am comfortable with the mechanics of writing small programs.<p>In most places, I would be considered a junior developer having some mastery over smaller scale work before delving deep into software production and design topics. This confuses several people when they see my years of experience, especially recruiters who usually have to cope with their own limited sense of technical knowledge to accurately fit workers into proper roles.<p>Seems like I have greatly missed out on a part of the pipeline that has creeping into more developer jobs, and I (possibly a bad luck thing) somehow has continued to evade this invasion through particular jobs that don&#x27;t expose me to it.<p>Despite that, I tell myself and others that I am not a systems admin, but a developer. I have 0 experience working with an &quot;operations&quot; team and have little experience with the deployment part of the pipeline, with the exception of blogs and brochure-style websites that use shared hosting services.<p>My understanding is that it&#x27;s the people that would be doing the job of fortune 50 companies if they were trying to roll their own data infrastructure?<p>If developers are expected to take more roles, doesn&#x27;t that turn development into &quot;second class&quot; work if no one is left to fill a dedicated role for software development?<p>With the work I do, I just &quot;throwing it over a wall&quot; and we pay a third party hosting service to handle it. Uptime, stability, that&#x27;s usually left on them so I don&#x27;t really need to think about it.<p>Yet if new devops work involves more and more writing code for automation systems, then perhaps we need to make a case for why has rebranding take place. Has it been mainly due to shifting more responsibilities around different people?
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wpietri
As a recovering sysadmin, I'd say it's not just a rebranding. Sysadmin work
was a mix of hardware, networking, OS, and app operations. With the rise of
AWS, etc, a lot of that work got spun off to cloud operators. The "cattle not
pets" shift removed another chunk of it. So true devops work is more applying
developer thinking to what was left of operations.

But I want to address this part:

> If developers are expected to take more roles, doesn't that turn development
> into "second class" work if no one is left to fill a dedicated role for
> software development?

The answer is no. My dad started writing software in 1968. From the way he
tells it, good developers never just threw things over the wall. They made
things for people to use, things that ran efficiently within the constraints
of the platform of the day.

I feel the same way today. Devops approaches give teams control over (and
responsibility for) the whole lifecycle of the software they write. That's
great! Instead of wondering what happens over in ops-land and hoping we get it
right, now we can make sure it's right. And this is aided by the rise of the
observability movement, giving developers the ability to see inside the
running software.

To my mind, there's no such thing as "dedicated" software development, where
it happens in isolation. That's like wanting to cook food without caring
whether people eat it or how they're enjoying it. I think it's great that
teams are expected to operate what they build, and are given the right tools
for that.

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fragmede
Also, the shift to SaaS also helped devops ascend. 24/7, 5-nine uptime
expectations meant it was business critical for Google or Gmail to always be
up.

Honestly, to some degree, it _is_ a rebranding which makes me sad. It's a
rebranding because companies didn't change their company culture or change the
job requirements. Devops is a _new_ job consisting of sysadmin duties and
developer abilities, and the time to actually work on things. Worse, as "on-
call code janitors", they often are at the bottom of the totem at a company.
(As a developer it is important to understand a company's totem. Google has
engineers at the top of the totem; Salesforce has sales at the top. Apple puts
design at the top.)Denying devops the time to do _both_ makes you complicit in
it merely being a rebranding. Denying the devops team both SWE and sysadmin
makes for either a dev team or a sysadmin team but not a SRE team.

There are companies that "get it". But there are far more that don't. We, as
devops, have no system for "Apple's role id 1234 isn't _actually_ a devops
role. If you want want to be a sysadmin, whos paid well, please apply, but
it's not the promised land where you, as an individual who wants to live in
the CI/CD SRE promised land, want to go.

Thus, it's ~meaningless everytime I see the string "devops" in a job posting
because without further interrogation, I can't know if the job is dev, or ops,
or devops. Which is where it actually counts.

~~~
wpietri
Yes, you're totally right. A lot of the things called "devops" are actually
just ops. That sysadmins automate what they can is nothing new. In the early
90s I ran a unix workstation lab and wrote tools that would be familiar in
spirit to a lot of things today.

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vosper
I don't think DevOps was really supposed to mean "developers should also do
operations" (though, that's a lot of what has actually happened, and you're
right that with Cloud Stuff and other third-party solutions like Heroku a lot
of specialist sysadmin-era knowledge isn't needed in many places anymore)...

I think it's _actually_ supposed to mean "the people doing operations should
also be developers". They should have the technical skills and the agency to
create software to solve their problems. And to the extent that sysadmins
hacked together perl scripts or bash scripts to solve problems, it is presumed
that it would be better if they were more skilled software engineers who would
have hacked together _better_ solutions - maybe less arcane, less one-man-
band, better abstractions, reusable, less copy-paste, etc... I don't know if
that's fair.

I think it's half true and half rebranding. DevOps theory - and the services
that go with / enabled it - has really changed how a lot of software teams
work. And the rebranding helps with the paycheck, too - which is why all your
DevOps teams are now restyling themselves as SREs (and hey, if they actually
do some of the SRE stuff then it's a win, right?)

~~~
jvagner
Most devops I’ve run into aren’t doing devops. Devops, against sysadmin, build
and manage the systems that manage the systems, hopefully as automations or
infra-as-a-service or software defined infra. When you think you’re devops but
you’re barely sysadmin you’re probably just an interrupt driven ops person who
gets to sysadmin during build-outs or maintenance.

~~~
vosper
Hah, yah you might have nailed it there

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echoteecat
In the "bad old days" a company would commission capacity studies to see how
many server they would need to run the parts of their service in data centers
and colos. Then they would buy racks and racks of hardware that all had tags
for which part of the system they were destined for. An army of network
engineers would make sure that the systems were interconnected to the right
routers and switches, and that the networks were appropriately segmented. An
army of sysadmins would take all of that raw hardware and would painstakingly
follow endless checklists and procedure binders to make sure that each piece
of hardware was correctly configured to run its part of the system.

But, with the cloud, you buy hardware, stick a base OS on it, and it becomes
an amorphous amount of cpu cores, RAM, and harddrives (or at least we try to
make people think it works like that). And if everything now runs in a VM, or
a container, you can "just" write software that says "I need 6 database
servers, 8 event bus servers, 9 back end servers, and 3 load balancers, and
we'll use a CDN for all the static assets." (gross oversimplification). And if
you need to reconfigure it to be 5-7-12-5-9, you just stop the old VMs and
start new ones. You don't need to follow a checklist to make sure that you've
correctly uninstalled MySQL 5.6.9, and need to install MariaDB 10.1.35.

DevOps is a very different mindset to traditional System Administration.

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ProphetMargin
System administration has been going the route that network administration
went a few years prior: Automate and turn everything into a process, so you
can hire the cheapest possible people that are capable of following a process
and using some pre-made tools. Software development seems to be heading that
direction too. As someone who spent the first third of their career in LAN/WAN
networking, the second third in Solaris and Linux administration, and the last
10 years or so in the embedded and RTOS areas, it's been painful to watch it
happen.

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specialist
When I complimented my teenaged son's new found goth sensibilities, he snuffed
and deigned to inform me that in fact he was "emo". So I asked for
clarification. Best as I could tell, in his opinion, "goth" is what old people
did.

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CyberFonic
In my experience, a decades ago, many sys admins never wrote programs, not
even scripts to automate their work. This was more the case with IBM and
similar mainframes and minis. In those environments the networking and various
subsystems were complicated enough to require a team just to make sure things
worked well. Many enterprise Windows deployments were also like that.

As programmers were increasingly required to administer the machines and
networks they worked with, they also started automating their work a lot more
than was possible with the rigid enterprise systems. Hence the emergence of
the fusion of development and operations in certain cases. I think that the
term "devops" can mean different things depending upon the technologies being
used at a given site.

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rachelbythebay
It’s a warning. If they call it that, be wary of signing on.

Unless, you know, you like doing ops work all day every day.

~~~
maps7
I just saw a job description with a Software Engineer title and had this as
the description:

"looking for an amazing Engineer who will be responsible for the design,
implementation, configuration and support of the software product; including
specifying, provisioning and operating our cloud infrastructure"

It's a good company but I probably won't apply because I've no idea if I would
be coding or provisioning cloud infrastructure.

~~~
askafriend
> It's a good company but I probably won't apply because I've no idea if

You could ask them when you talk to them...

~~~
maps7
I've been in my current job for 7/8 years so not really sure how the interview
process works. I saw the ad on LinkedIn and it looks like the only option to
proceed is to send a CV.

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brogrammernot
The same reason that Quality Assurance or Manual testers as been re-branded as
“Quality Engineering / Quality Engineers”. Everyone wants to be an engineer
and it’s a recruiting tactic.

Do you see many DBAs anymore? I haven’t seen them for awhile, I’ve seen plenty
of Database Engineer or Database Developer job postings.

I’d say if they’re going to call you an engineer, asked to be paid like a
software engineer.

~~~
aliswe
But the tools and tech are not the same for sysadmins and devops people.

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sunstone
While they are similar my sense is that Sysadmin is an inward facing function
supporting the organization whereas devops is outward facing technology
dealing with the public on the internet. Each environment has its own
challenges.

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burpsnard
first software i bought came in a box, disks and manuals.

now i rent an online service.

the coders behind each of these ventures have different tasks : the first,
devising installation and operating manuals for an offline world, the second
for a day by day continuous challenge of measuring and updating the service's
capabilities and market value

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sergiotapia
The clear answer is that corporations paid a lot of money for this change.
Google's AWS's Microsoft's all wanted sysadmin to go away and devops to be in
as a way to sell their services. Read more into it

~~~
aliswe
Why so conspiratory. Yes marketing is one aspect of it. But then again a
massive amount of sysadmins are required to manage the cloud ops and very
often you need a full time devops person on site to replace the sysadmin. In
other words efficiency might have gone up but the it budgets did not go down.
All in all the world became better with devops for everyone but the ones whos
jobs are not as relevant as they were yesterday.

