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Comment by mholmes680 | Hacker News Reader

>>DevOps is good for people who like to always be learning; it can be difficult for people who like to ever more deeply specialize.

I agree with this, but I wonder if its because people right now are just still trying to figure out the tech. We're in the beginning of the adoption curve, so to speak and specialties will come eventually.

As an additional point, I see DevOps expanding to DevSecOps, DevTestOps, and when the marketing folks catch up I'm sure we'll soon see DevSecTestOps. These are all just fancy words for being a more complete Developer - and enabling Developers to deliver faster.

Anecdotally... From where I'm sitting right now (devops IT, huge non-tech company), it hasn't actually solved the problem of dumping crap over the wall, because ultimately people balk when going to prod with changes. (Compliance/SOX, fear of change, gui based existing deployments, bad APIs, etc....)

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>These are all just fancy words for being a more complete Developer - and enabling Developers to deliver faster.

So would I get paid more for being good at all of these areas? Or is this a move to open up a bunch of positions for mediocre people? (no offense, I am mediocre at code)

Because DevOps fans seem to be advocating for more responsibility for similar/less pay (and you're outright fucking yourselves if you take on-call often without compensation).

If DevOps moves anything like software does, there will be industry leaders which cause a lot of followers (90%) to hamfist the 10%'s methods onto their weird deployment/lifecycle processes and it will be an ongoing mutant until some other new thing promises to bring the light.

With all due respect, you are responsible for how much you get paid. If it behooves you to stay current with trends, capitalize on them, identify bogus ones, then go for it. If you know of a better way, the ball is in your court.

I think a side-effect of devops is that more developers have to be good at more things, and less excellent at one. But, if I'm a hiring manager, there's places for both of those profiles in my team.

>With all due respect, you are responsible for how much you get paid.

That's fine, but if I'm maximizing my pay for the effort spent, I'm just going to screw companies as hard as I can by charging them a ton of money while doing very little for them as a contractor. As much as you'd think the market would remove people like this from the industry, it isn't happening.

I could join up as a fulltime employee for 6 months only to find out they don't actually want to change anything (despite lying to my face in the interview) and increase value because they're a shitty non-profit, which means I won't get rewarded for putting ideas forth. WHERE IS MY RECOURSE FOR WASTING 6 MONTHS OF MY LIFE?!

I've been percolating on this for a day or so now... because your responses on threads are generally abrasive, but i feel like most people actually feel this way and you just convey it abrasively. I think you should reframe anything from "wasting" to "learning from". You can have a lot to take away from even a bad situation, like:

a. Learning how to detect BS in interviews. Interviews are two-way streets.

b. Sit down and figure out what you really do want and how you ended up in this situation so it doesn't happen again.

c. 6 months over a career is nothing, and again, it wasn't wasted, its just the way you're looking at it.

d. Have you networked at all in these six months? If so, not wasted. If not, well that can only be on you not the company, right?

e. If you think non-profits are shitty, maybe a) they're not for you; b) you don't understand non-profits; and/or c) what were you doing there in the first place.

f. "screwing" a company is the same thing as looking out for your own needs (or in this case, the contractor's). There's good and bad contractors, of course.

Your observations may not necessarily be wrong, but to say it was a waste of time is short-sighted.

(edit: formatting)

There will always be specialties because humans naturally gravitate towards subsets of any field of endeavor, and because computing has grown too vast for one person to master all of it. The real change over the past couple of decades is that we have developed enough of the technical tools and libraries to automate system admin and operations, that the foundations of the whole field have shifted. We need to start out as being DevOps Engineers and specialize on that base.

> These are all just fancy words for being a more complete Developer - and enabling Developers to deliver faster.

Exactly. I'm a mobile developer and I cross into "DevOps" field a lot, but I see it as a part of my job as a developer to make our team's lives easier.

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