
DevOps in Your Job Title is Doing You Harm - ohjeez
http://blog.petecheslock.com/2013/05/03/devops-in-your-job-title-is-doing-you-harm/
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colechristensen
In my position I am not an Operator, though I do operations; I am not an an
Administrator, though I do administration; I am not a Developer, though I do
write code.

I am not an Architect, I am an Engineer.

I don't engineer software, hardware, or physical machines. I engineer systems.
Systems of interrelated hardware, software, tools and people. I can't abstract
my position away from any of these things. Like any good engineer, part of my
job is getting my hands dirty working with those systems.

I am a Systems Engineer and the title is very appropriate. If things fail, I
do bear a higher burden of responsibility than many others, but certainly not
always the only responsibility.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Back in the before times that role was 'Systems Analyst' it can be very
fulfilling but it takes a special person to be good at it. I try to keep track
of systems people I meet over time, good ones are rare.

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vacri
_If DevOps fails, it should be a failure of the entire company._ and _The
reality is that DevOps is a culture that should be accepted by every facet of
your organization_

How is it a failure of the payroll officer, the loading dock crew, the counter
staff, the cleaners? (Or relevant departments). DevOps failed because the
receptionists weren't buying in? Us techies get the blinkers on and think that
it's only us that are important to keeping the company rolling. Finance people
often suffer the same delusion.

Either I'm missing something, or the author and I have wildly different
definitions of 'devops'.

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benjaminwootton
As the owner of a startup DevOps consultancy, I'm also extremely tired of the
"DevOps is not a job title" meme.

If you work on configuration management, cloud automation, monitoring,
deployment automation, continuous delivery, infrastructure agility then it's
an _extremely_ adept label for what you do. This work is at the intersection
of development and operations and empowers both sides to deliver business
value better.

Likewise, if you work as a higher level change agent, breaking down dev/ops
siloes, removing bureaucracy, empowering people to deliver, refocusing dev/ops
on business delivery etc etc then DevOps is also a really nice badge to
describe what you do.

If you cover both of these then you are squarely at the root of the DevOps
philosophy. Wear that title with a badge of honour because it's tricky but
extremely valuable if you can carry it off.

From the article: _When you are the Head of DevOps, you “Own” DevOps. If
DevOps fails it is your failure, when it should be a failure of the entire
company to change, adapt, and accept the cultural shift._

If you are the director of DevOps then it is your job to influence and deliver
that cultural and organisational change as well as just running operations. If
you do the latter then you've simply given yourself an inappropriate job
title. It doesn't mean it's a bad one in other contexts.

~~~
dc2447
I find it telling that so many people are so irked by the change in the
nomenclature of ops. There are many people and businesses who have set their
stall out to be transformative agents in operations, moving from old ops to
devops.

But the problem is that devops has gone from being aspirational for many to
the de facto for many.

It's the post devops world. There is no devops anymore, just ops.

~~~
nasalgoat
The problem I have with the DevOps label is that it is trying to lump yet
another task on the overwhelming heap that is your average system
administrator's task list - namely, doing the actual coding and developing of
the system you're managing.

In my 20 years of experience, the two roles of developer and admin have had
very conflicting purposes in that one is encouraged to change and expand
systems, while the other is encouraged to stabilize and reliably maintain. The
conflict can only serve to make one role suffer over the other, or provide
poor quality results for both.

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sdfjkl
Sysadmins get all the blame and none of the praise, no matter the job title.
So it has been for times immemorial and so it will always be.

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dmourati
"In the end - titles really don’t matter very much, and they shouldn’t matter
much."

Yea, tell that to the CEO. Think about it, how else do outsiders know how to
interface with the right people in your company?

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nostrademons
The SRE title at Google/Facebook was designed specifically to highlight the
fact that it's an _engineering_ role, and the goal is to automate all of your
routine responsibilities so that everything you do is creative problem-
solving. The position within the organization is different from a traditional
sysadmin, as well: in many organizations developers throw their programs over
the wall to sysadmins and say "Make this work, and deal with any problems that
come up", while the SRE/SWE relationship at GooBook is "We'll consult with you
on reliable software development practices, and we have the authority to block
any changes that have a large probability of taking the site down."

