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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

> This often creates a situation where people need to "justify" their jobs.

On DevOps teams I see this constantly. Usually the best-compensated or most senior "Ops" guy or whatever they're called at the company spends a lot of his time extinguishing fires that were either entirely of his own creation/incompetence, which makes it look like he's "doing something." You automate away the majority of the toil there and this person doesn't have a job, yet this pattern is so insanely common. There's little incentive to do it right when doing it right means management thinks you sit there all day and do nothing.

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Sometimes people want to be firefighters to protect the people they serve but others love how being in a crisis makes them feel alive. The later are why arson investigators first look at firefighters when doing an arson investigation. Some of them need the fires and will start them just to fight them.

There are a lot of these types that gravitate to crisis management roles like DevOps.

Which is one reason DevOps teams don't make sense. DevOps is a skill developers need to have. It needs to be embedded within the development team, not some other team's responsibility who only focuses on "DevOps" work. You create the build and deployment pipelines and move on to other project work. If you give someone a role and say their job is to do "DevOps" they will HAVE to invent things to do because that's such a small part of a project and once implemented doesn't need a ton of maintenance.

It is not about DevOps. In every organization if you do your work good and have no fuckups - you will not be recognized and promoted. But if you are hero-firefighter - managers will love you and help with promotion.

Because visibility is a key! Key to everything in the corporate life. If your work is not visible for managers - you are doing nothing.

Of course visibility is key. What other kind of option is there?

> “We have no idea what you did this year and no one has any idea of the value you’re providing, but what the hell. Here’s a huge bonus!”

That doesn’t seem a little insane to you?

> What other kind of option is there?

Placing value based on the work assigned? Obviously insanely easier said than done. But I think we should embrace the fuzziness a bit. Your manager should have a very good idea of this. If they don't, then they're the ones that should be let go because this is a significant aspect of their job. (may be learned through indirect methods)

> That doesn’t seem a little insane to you?

Honestly, a lot of business practices and economics sounds insane to me. Similarly a lot of alternative suggestions (especially the latter) since they tend to not address the underlying issues but be bandaids. The ones that don't sound insane are often boring and very reasonable, but I think we've established that that's considered undesirable when you're evaluated by visibility. I think this is probably a significant part of the negative feedback loop.

The fortunate thing is there are measurable metrics you can hit and improve upon as an X-Ops team, but implementing those takes buyin from the org or enough freedom to go rogue and do it on your own.

> The fortunate thing is there are measurable metrics you can hit and improve upon as an X-Ops team

Question(s):

- What are the metrics?

- How aligned are the metrics with the actual goal?

- What isn't covered by the metrics?

- How is what's not covered by metrics evaluated?

- Can what's not currently covered by metrics theoretically be covered by some potentially unknown metric? (best guess)

> It is not [just] DevOps

Definitely agree. In a sister comment[0] I mention a concept I've been calling "Goodhart's Hell" for a more general term. But I think what you are specifically mentioning is sometimes laughably called "Loud Laboring"[1]. I think this all falls under the broader umbrella of metric hacking and thus Goodhart's Law.

Idk why, but it really does seem like metric hacking is extremely pervasive in our modern society, and can be found nearly everywhere. What upsets me the most is that it too is found in the sciences. There also appears to be a strong correlation between the popularity (or hype) of a field and metric hacking.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38647582

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37147707 || https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/forget-quiet-quitting-loud-l...

That's a fantastic example of what I'm trying to describe. It's kinda like thinking hours worked is directly proportional to widgets produced. There certainly are jobs and situations where this relationship holds (can't sell widgets if you aren't manning the store or can't produce turn crank widgets if the crank isn't being turned). But modern world widgets don't work that way and are more abstract. Sometimes fewer hours creates more widgets, sometimes the reverse. But widget production is now stochastic and especially in fields where creativity and brain power are required. (Using widgets for generalization -- in the economic sense--, insert any appropriate product or ask and I'll clarify)

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