
Ask HN: I'm being left out of SRE and DevOps by my manager. Should I be worried? - DrBGB
I am a web developer working on react and backend REST APIs. I have the skills and want to be
closer to the deployed product working as SRE and DevOps. Writing anisble scripts and maintaining production instances.<p>It&#x27;s a small team. I&#x27;m not allowed to do Devops things because &#x27;me being a developer is worth more&#x27;.
I think that&#x27;s a terrible idea. I can only become a better developer by working close to the deployed product.<p>Having less SREs and shared devops knowledge can only hurt things.
The team rationale is computers fail all the time. We should have SRE scripts that recover things.
I hate that idea. I want to know why servers failed. My belief is if you don&#x27;t understand the root cause it&#x27;ll just keep happening.<p>Is this a naieve belief? Am I in the wrong here?
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poulsbohemian
> 'me being a developer is worth more'

See things from your manager's perspective. They have work they need
accomplished. They have a small team - maybe not big enough for the work they
need to accomplish - and of that work, some will directly create profit for
the company and some will cut/ control costs, and still other work will be
"stuff".

Your manager is telling you that they need your skills in a particular area,
like due to staff shortages, skill shortages, or more specifically the _value_
of the work. Take this as a sign that your skills set and labor are valued,
just not perhaps in the way you prefer.

If developing skills in other areas (IE: SRE, devops, etc) is important to
you, consider ongoing conversations where you make it clear you want to build
this skills, and partner with your manager to do so. If that just isn't going
to happen in this team, then consider your career path elsewhere if this is
really important to you.

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ThrowawayR2
A lot of developers have a cowboy coder mentality that causes problems when
they are given access to production instances. That's caused many
organizations to establish a wall between development teams and operations.

Learn to work with your devops team to get the information you need.
Developers should not need direct production access.

~~~
neuroticfish
> Developers should not need direct production access.

Then stop telling me I need years of experience with Docker, K8s, AWS, etc. on
dev job listings.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
The architect who designed my house does not need access to come inside my
house anytime they feel like it.

~~~
neuroticfish
If in order to get a job as a senior architect I have to have experience that
I can only get by having access to come inside your house, then yeah I kind of
do.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Nope. Developers can get all the experience they need in a dev sandbox
environment with all the same tools and infra. They do not need access to the
production environment.

~~~
poulsbohemian
It's a responsibility / authority issue, generally brought on by poor
management. I get what you are saying, and I suspect many in this thread agree
with your sentiments. Frankly, when I'm wearing the developer hat I'd rather
_not_ have production access, because then I can tell management / the
business that I can't fix their production issue. But, often management is
going to cajole, yell, scream, etc at whomever they think can fix the problem,
and that often ends up with a developer _who doesn 't even want to be there_
having production access in order to fight yet another fire. Shouldn't be that
way, but there it is.

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Ironlikebike
> The team rationale is computers fail all the time. We should have SRE
> scripts that recover things.

This is a potentially very risky approach. I was given the task of having my
org stand up a large, complicated system. My engineering team built a system
that was failing 2% here, 10% there, 5% somewhere, etc. They built recovery
and retry mechanisms for every failure scenario. We ended up with a combined
failure rate of 40% that was masking the failures but basically doubled our
execution time for the service. I locked down all new development and directed
all of our effort toward driving accumulated failures below 5%. They
completely disagreed with me (because they'd gotten used to the life of being
firefighters). Once we got to below 5% their opinion changed completely.
They're very proud of how they were able to drive down the error rate.

Watch out for accumulated error (or even worse--compounded error)!

On the other hand, you can expect that any network based service will fail and
need to retry. It's especially important to make software that relies on
cloud-based services resilient in this regard.

------
mancerayder
"Not being allowed to do DevOps things" is best practice, and sometimes
mandated by law or policy ("zero developer access to production.")

Some possibilities for doing DevOps things again are:

* request a "glass break" account for emergencies. You'll need to meet with someone senior to get that signed off on, and then someone needs to write some automation for that.

* Ask to move to a DevOps role instead of back end web dev.

Some possibilities for better visibility, which is a better goal if you ask
me:

* set up a status meeting that's once every week or two weeks or month with the DevOps/SRE team or person(s)

* ask to be part of the monitoring setup, or set up your own monitoring that you can then share.

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msencenb
If we transcend the holy war of dev vs ops, practically speaking this is
likely a team culture and skill set question.

If you being a dev is worth more, the team either has the ops under control,
or you need to demonstrate why you being closer to the ops provides business
value.

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kasey_junk
If your org treats dev as more valuable than SRE you likely aren’t doing SRE
correctly. It should be a fairly high status role. Your org likely just has an
old fashioned ops team that has rebranded.

In any case you definitely don’t want to move from a high status position to a
low status one in your organization. Switch orgs to one that treats what you
want to do as high status.

For what it’s worth, I agree that your manager is wrong but there are lots of
ways to skin a cat and a dev/op split is a very traditional route that lots of
teams are successful at.

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nwsm
> We should have SRE scripts that recover things. I hate that idea. I want to
> know why servers failed. My belief is if you don't understand the root cause
> it'll just keep happening.

It sounds like you are not only worried about you being involved, but also
about the current state of your team's DevOps / SRE practices. Hopefully you
can still push for higher standards in that space even if you are not directly
involved day to day.

> It's a small team. I'm not allowed to do Devops things because 'me being a
> developer is worth more'. I think that's a terrible idea. I can only become
> a better developer by working close to the deployed product.

By the same token, it is not good for you to be the expert on everything. With
a small team it's easy for one person to become the go-to SME for everything.
This is just as dangerous as having faulty DevOps and SRE practices. The
company has little ability to prevent you from leaving, getting sick,
forgetting things that only you touched, etc.

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psmithsfhn
I think it's pretty common, as a developer, to be told, effectively, "Get back
in the corner and do what you were hired to do -- not think -- just code --
leave the grown-up things to the grown-ups."

This is just an extension of Taylorism -- early assembly-line thinking --
where each human becomes like a very simple machine -- and therefore stupid,
dull-minded, unquestioning.

That said, I think you are conflating several different issues here.

But just sticking to your first question in the title -- no, you do not need
to be worried.

Unless you decide you want to be more than a coder/developer. In that case,
start looking for a new job.

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jshawl
> me being a developer is worth more

so a salary increase is justified, then, eh?

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throwaway_18116
I'm having the opposite problem. My organization (Fortune 500 company) has
decided to fire almost all of the sys admins and say that developers are
responsible for their full stack. My company usually has teams of 1 developer
each, and each developer has several projects. Given this arrangement I have
to not only write all of the code (mostly scientific computing and statistics)
and mange the servers (OS updates, deployments, etc).

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cmdshiftf4
What were the responsibilities listed in the job you applied for?

>Writing anisble scripts

Skunkworks an effort on this in your downtime and in doing so prove your
capabilities, would be my suggestion.

>maintaining production instances.

If you're deploying to AWS or another cloud provider it's more than rational
that it's locked down to a certain set of people (devops/SRE) made responsible
for that infrastructure.

>I want to know why servers failed.

Ask for read access to your logging infrastructure?

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notsmart
You're not wrong. You're just working with the wrong people. If you want to be
a part of the full system including SRE and DevOps tasks start looking for a
new place to work. If you expect this group to change you're probably setting
yourself up for failure.

~~~
gjvc
Thank you for this reminder.

