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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> Noone will pay you for invoking existing solutions. They pay you to push the boundary.

I wouldn't put it like that. 90% of DevOps jobs is to invoke the existing solutions quickly. Sure, there will be a little bit of pushing the boundaries here and there was needed. But largely I'd describe those jobs as putting the Lego blocks together every day - and there's lots of money in it.

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DevOps Engineer here, former Lead (moved from startup to Big Corp). That's literally my job day in day out. Put the Lego bricks together. Everybody around me tells me I'm doing a good job and I'm sitting here thinking, "but all I did was Google these things and insert some variables in some Helm charts?"

The other part of my job is more difficult, which is encouraging teams to de-silo and automate wherever possible but so many of the employees are threatened by this idea at Big Corp that I'm encountering a LOT of resistance.

I think your first point answers your second point. It's only human nature for people to worry about their jobs.

Same here. It's easy to forget the difference between a master LEGO builder and the average person just piecing together bricks though. Knowing what to build and when/how is a lot of the job too. I try and remind myself that we're also often there to help other people build better things, perhaps analogous to automatically sorting LEGO bricks so other people building can move faster with fewer compromises.

This applies to most high-value knowledge work. Figuring out which problem to solve and how to define success is much more difficult than actually turning the crank to implement whatever solution.

Quickly and cheaply. People who only do development tend to look at every problem as some code they need to write.

We saved multiple customers a lot of time and money by just doing minor load balancer or web server configurations, rather than letting their developers doing a custom application to handle things like proxying or URL rewrites. Similarly we also frequently have to ask customers why they aren't offloading work to their databases and let it do sorting, selection, aggregation or search.

Having just a small amount of knowledge about what your existing tools can actually do for you, and knowing how to "Lego" them together solve a large number of everyday problems.

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