Agree that devs not needing to know this is how things should be, and that CTO/tech management however is not acting this way.
It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC.
If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at the start of a project, as hamfistedly as possible, probably over-provisioning so I don't have to go back to it anytime soon. All so I can move onto what I am paid to do - delivering functionality to stakeholders. Someone who deals with IaC as part of their full-time job will be the expert who can move more quickly & correctly through it.
Sometimes this is just galaxy brain budget arb, where the infra org gets to show a cost save, to the detriment of the appdev org.
Staff SRE here: I comfortably exceed your TC by a factor likely approaching 2.0 doing harder shit than your whole team combined. That’s nothing against you, only that you don’t really know what you’re talking about here. I can safely conclude that because 20% of your app dev TC is not in any ops in the US, particularly not DevOps-school, not even “legacy-style” SA; hospital SA, for example, used to be a high six-figure, pensioned gig, until we commoditized ops as a concept in our reinventions and pushed everyone to AWS.
Hint: I wrote operating systems for fun before becoming an SRE. Imagine how much fun I have explaining context switches and CPU cache invalidation and their implications on their app’s performance, to application developers who consume frameworks and look down on my salary! Building a distributed computer at scale is much, much, much harder than your Linode tutorial expectations of what ops does.
Native software is mostly dead, so operations is software engineering now, at least those parts of software engineering you folks threw out when Docker came along and turn your nose up at, and I make more money every year cleaning up the low-hanging fruit y’all leave around, so…
It may be true your TC is so high, and I salute is so. Clearly my tone implied a level of looking down my nose I didn't intend.
Now take all the stuff you are an expert at, and imagine the CTO assigned to you - build dashboards of accounting information. You don't do UI, and you don't know accounting (maybe YOU do, but your average SRE/DevOps do not).
It wouldn't make sense right? And a lot of those tasks can be done by a junior "data analyst / BI dev". So it would be an expensive mistake as well.
> stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC
Did you mean for this to be condescending towards ops? Because that’s how it sounds.
Ops is not easy, at all. Even if you’re doing zero IaC, I defy the average dev to try to provision a Linux box from scratch and install, configure, tune, and maintain the stack you need to run your code. Throw IaC atop that, and now you need to understand declarative programming and OOP concepts to be able to do it efficiently. Then, there’s K8s…
Not to mention the architecture side of things. Devs love to grab whatever shiny thing they saw on a Medium blog, even when it’s a poor fit to their problem (or their problem is unoptimized code). You probably do not need a columnar DB, you just need to normalize your tables and learn relational algebra.
I do not mean to be condescending. I am being literal.
Every job is hard, and the pay is not exactly commensurate with effort.
Ops is absolutely hard and theres a lot to learn. And in doing so you generally may end up with DevOps teams with minimal to zero domain knowledge in what the company delivers to end users.
So if you have a team of people who built a deep level of expertise in something over 10, 15, 20 years and that something is business facing, domain knowledge, etc.. then it is not of value to have their time spent on other tasks.
Often these DevOps roles are filled by more junior staff at the earlier stages of their career. This is another reason the staffing is usually lower cost.
It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC.
If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at the start of a project, as hamfistedly as possible, probably over-provisioning so I don't have to go back to it anytime soon. All so I can move onto what I am paid to do - delivering functionality to stakeholders. Someone who deals with IaC as part of their full-time job will be the expert who can move more quickly & correctly through it.
Sometimes this is just galaxy brain budget arb, where the infra org gets to show a cost save, to the detriment of the appdev org.