The heaviness of maintaining systems
Ops is not peripheral to the job, ops is an essential part of the job.<p>The job is always to make that computer box there do X when I the paying customer click Y button. On the inside there is some algorithm design and logic that tells the computer how to do the job, and also there is some stage setting and lighting and camera setup to cue the computer on what, when, where, and why do the job (and write down who told it to do it).<p>In terms of classic &#x27;developer writes features then leaves it to ops to actually make the code be useful to customers&#x27; (AKA specialization inside the software realm), the division of front-line soldiers vs logistics comes to mind here.<p>If you don&#x27;t have a front line, the enemy takes the land and you lose. If you don&#x27;t have logistics, you lose the front line to starvation &#x2F; lack of ammo, and then you lose the front line, then you lose the war.<p>So if you are in strict operations, you may be the logistics side of that, and the front-liners may look down on you for not doing &#x27;the thing&#x27;, but if you weren&#x27;t there to do your job, then they get to starve, run out of ammo, or do your job as well (aka becoming more generalist &#x2F; end to end ownership &#x2F; full stack SRE) as their previous job.<p>Reader: Ok smart guy, what&#x27;s your solution?<p>I advocate to stop splitting the job of dev and ops into separate roles and doing the devops practices for everybody. We lose theorized competitive advantage but gain flexibility and more well-rounded skill sets so we really can call ourselves software engineers.<p>If you can code algorithms but not properly manage the lifecycle of your code after entering it into the source code file (testing, deployment, runtime, data migration, upgrades, decomissioning), you only have half the toolkit.<p>If you can do one or more of the other pieces but not do reasonable data structure and algorithm design relevant to the problem space, you only have half the toolkit.<p>We don&#x27;t have residential plumbers arbitrarily split between vertical pipes and horizontal pipes...all the pipes are needed, so the plumber learns to handle both. Why did we let the &#x27;expensive computer operators + cheap clerical roles&#x27; of the punch card era split up our profession today into &#x27;devs&#x27; vs &#x27;ops&#x27;?