Hacker News Reader

Comment by r0s | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the "Every dev should be senior" mindset that is all too common in this industry.

I don't see how supposing every devOps specialist is replaceable by average engineers is a real solution.

Every dev should be senior, in my experience is a result of dumb hierarchies and skewed goals. Where I work (as a manager), we're given a certain number of "heads" (headcount) each quarter. As managers, we get to decide what level we want to hire at. There's no tradeoffs presented to us. We're basically asked, "would you like a junior, senior or staff level engineer?" Most managers just try to hire as senior as possible because it increases the size of their fiefdom and gives them more clout. A staff engineer will command more respect in meetings and will get his/her way more often. It's a toxic culture of unaligned goals where managers aren't penalized for spending too much on their teams and are rewarded political successes rather than shipping code. If I wasn't resting-n-vesting, I'd be out of there.

The beauty of Docker is that it, to some extent, does turn average engineers into devops specialists. They just specialize in a very specific, somewhat abstract/virtual environment. Then the real devops specialists can write tooling around that virtual environment that doesn't require detailed knowledge of what's inside the black box. It's an interface between application and deployment engineers that obviates the need to coordinate on deployment process.

I think it's something different. "Junior devs shouldn't reinvent the wheel in production [1] until after they understand the solutions of the senior members of their field." I.e., don't use MongoDB until you fully understand SQL and don't build your own fancy planning algo until you you understand linear programming.

[1] When learning, reinvent all the wheels.

Also, don't use SQL until you fully understand MongoDB.

And don't use MongoDB for data that matters ;-)

No. SQL is the culmination of years of research into data storage systems. It's a well established solution to a large number of problems. MongoDB simply isn't.

So just use something you don't understand because someone said so. Got it.

No. Trust in what's battle tested in production.

Use MongoDB for all your pet projects, all your development. Joining data from documents is good way to learn where SQL came from.

Just don't do it in production before you master it.

Can't upvote this enough. Expertise is very difficult to replicate, yet it's the first solution everybody reaches for when things don't quite work the way they want. Just pile onto the number of domains a developer is expected to fully understand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com