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The Social Quandry of Devops (#440)
* the social quandry of devops Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@christine.website> * the social quandry of devops: more better Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@christine.website>
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title: Technical Solutions Poorly Solve Social Problems
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date: 2022-03-17
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tags:
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- devops
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---
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[I just wanna lead this article out by saying that _I do not have all the
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answers here_. I really wish I did, but I also feel that I shouldn't have to
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have an answer in mind in order to raise a question. Please also keep in mind
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that this is coming from someone who has been working in devops for most of
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their career.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
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## Or: The Social Quandry of Devops
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Technology is the cornerstone of our society. As a people we have seen the
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catalytic things that technology has enabled us to do. Through technology and
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new and innovative ways of applying it, we can help solve many problems. This
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leads some to envision technology as a panacea, a mythical cure-all that will
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make all our problems go away with the right use of it.
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This does not extend to social problems. Technical fixes for social problems are
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how we end up with an inadequate mess that can make the problem a lot worse than
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it was before. You've almost certainly been able to see this in action with
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social media (under the belief that allowing people to connect is so morally
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correct that it will bring in a new age of humanity that will be objectively
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good for everyone). The example I want to focus on today is the Devops
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philosophy. Devops is a technical solution (creating a new department) that
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helps work around social problems in workplaces (fundamental differences in
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priorities and end goals), and in the process it doesn't solve either very well.
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There are a lot of skillset paths that you can end up with in tech, but the two
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biggest ones are development (making the computer do new things) and systems
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administration (making computers keep doing those things). There are many other
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silos in the industry (technical writing, project/product management, etc.), but
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the two main ones are development and systems administration. These two groups
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have vastly different priorities, skillsets, needs and future goals, and as a
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result of this there is very little natural cross-pollenation between the two
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silos. I have seen this evolve into cultural resentment.
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[Not to say that this phenomenon is exclusive to inter-department ties, I've
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also seen it happen intra-department over choice of programming language.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
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As far as the main differences go, development usually sees what could be. What
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new things could exist and what steps you need to take to get people there. This
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usually involves designing and implementing new software. The systems
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administration side of things is more likely to see it as a matter of
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integrating things into an existing whole, and then ensuring that whole is
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reliable and proven so they don't have to worry about it constantly. This causes
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a slower velocity forward and can result in extra process, slow momentum and
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stagnation. These two forces naturally come into conflict because they are
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vastly different things and have vastly different requirements and expectations.
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Development may want to use a new version of the compiler to support a language
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feature that will eliminate a lot of repetitive boilerplate. The sysadmins may
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not be able to ship that compiler in production build toolstack because of
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conflicting dependencies elsewhere, but they may also not want to ship that
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compiler because of fears over trusting unproven software in production.
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[This fear sounds really odd at first glance, but this is a paraphrased version
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of a problem I actually encountered in the real world at one of my first big
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tech jobs. This place had some unique tech choices such as making their own fork
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of Ubuntu for "stability reasons", and the process to upgrade tools was a huge
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pain on the sysadmin side because it meant retesting and deploying a lot of
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internal tooling, which took a lot longer than the engineering team had patience
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for. This may not be the best example from a technical standpoint, but things
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don't have to make sense for them to exist.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
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This tension builds over a long period of time and can cause problems when the
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sysadmin team is chronically underfunded (due to the idea that they are
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successful when nothing goes wrong, also incurring the problem of success being
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a negative, which can make the sysadmin team look like a money pit when they are
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actually the very thing that is making the money generator generate money). This
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can also lead to avoidable burnout, unwarranted anxiety issues and unneeded
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suffering on both ends of the conflict.
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So given the unstoppable force of development and the immovable wall of
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sysadmin, an organizational compromise was made. This started out as many things
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with many names, but as the idea rippled throughout people's heads the name
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"devops" ended up sticking. Devops is a hybrid of traditional software
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development and systems administration. On paper this should be great. The silos
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will shrink. People will understand the limits and needs of the others. Managers
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will be able to have more flexible employees.
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Unfortunately though, a lot of the ideas behind devops and the overall
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philosophy really do require you to radically burn down everything and start
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from scratch. This tends to really not be conducive to engineering timetables
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and overall system stability during the age of turbulence.
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[What's the problem with burning everything down? Fire cleanses all things and
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purifies away the unworthy!](conversation://Numa/delet)
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[Not when you're the one being burned!](conversation://Cadey/angy)
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[Wait, so what actually happens then? Does it just end up being a sysadmin team
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made up out of coders?](conversation://Mara/hmm)
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[Yeeeeeeeeep.](conversation://Numa/stare)
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Yeah, in practice this ends up being a "new team" or a reboot of an existing
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team in ways that is suddenly compelling or sexy to executives because a new
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buzzword is on the scene. Realistically, devops did end up getting a proper
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definition at a buzzword conference level (being able to handle development and
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deployment of services from editor to production), but in practice this ends up
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being just some random developers that you tricked into caring about production
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now while also telling them that they're better than the sysadmins.
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[Two jobs for the price of one!](conversation://Numa/delet)
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This ends up shafting the sysadmin team even harder because the new fancy devops
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team has things they can talk about as positives for their quarters, so people
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can more easily make a case for promotion. As a sysadmin, your "success" case is
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"bad things didn't happen", which means success can't stand out on reviews.
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Consider "scaled production above the rate of our customer acquistion rate"
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against "set up continuous delivery to ensure velocity on our team, saving 50
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hours of effort per week". Which one of those do you think gets you promoted?
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Which one of those do you think gets headcount for new hires?
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This has human costs too. At one of my past jobs doing more sysadmin-y things
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(it was marketed as a devops hybrid role, but the "hybrid" part was more of
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"frantically patch up the sinking ship with code" and not traditional software
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development). Sleep is really essential to helping you function properly to do
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your job. During the times when I was pager bitch, there was at least a 1/8
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chance that I would be woken up in the middle of the night to handle a problem.
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I had to change my pager tone 15 times and still get goosebumps hearing those
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old sounds nearly a decade later. This ended up being a huge factor in my
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developing anxiety issues that I still feel today. I ended up getting addicted
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to weed really bad for a few years. I admit that I'm really not the most robust
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person in the world, but these things add up.
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[I guess "addicted to weed" isn't totally accurate or inaccurate here, it's more
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that I was addicted to the feeling of being high rather than dependence on the
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drug itself. Either way, it was bad and weed was my cope. It also probably
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really didn't help that I was also starting hormone replacement therapy at the
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time, so I was going through second puberty at the time as well. This is the
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kind of human capital cost when dealing with dysfunction like this. I've always
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been kind of afraid to speak up about this.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
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However, there are real technical problems that can only really be solved from a
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devops perspective. Tools like Docker would probably never have happened in the
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way they did if the devops philosophy didn't exist.
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In a way, Docker is one of the perfect examples of the devops philosophy. It
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allows developers to have their own custom versions of everything. They can use
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custom compilers that the sysadmins don't have to integrate into everything.
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They can experiment with new toolstacks, languages and build systems without
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worrying about how they integrate into existing processes. And in the process it
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defaults to things that are so hilariously unsafe that you only really realize
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the problems when they own you. It makes it easy to ship around configurations
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for services yes, but it doesn't make supply chain management easy at all.
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[Wait, what about that? How does that make any sense?](conversation://Mara/wat)
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Okay, let's consider this basic Dockerfile that builds a Go service. If you
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start from very little knowledge of what's going on, you'd probably end up with
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something like this:
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```Dockerfile
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FROM golang:1.17
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WORKDIR /usr/src/app
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COPY go.mod go.sum ./
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RUN go mod download && go mod verify
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COPY . .
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RUN go build -v -o /usr/local/bin/app ./...
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CMD ["app"]
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```
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This allows you to pin the versions of things like the Go compiler without
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bothering the sysadmin team to make it available, but in the process you also
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don't know what version of the compiler you are actually running. Let's say that
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you have all your Docker images built with CI and that CI has an image cache set
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up (as is the default in many CI systems). On your laptop you may end up getting
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the latest release of Go 1.17 (at the time of writing, this is version 1.17.8),
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but since CI may have seen this before and may have an old version of the `1.17`
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tag cached. This would mean that despite your efforts at making things easy to
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recreate, you've just accidentally put [an ASN.1 parsing
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DoS](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/50165) into production, even though
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your local machine will never have this issue! Not to mention if the image
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you're using has a glibc bug, a DNS parsing bug or any issue with one of the
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packages that makes up the image.
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[So as a side effect of burning down everything and starting over you don't
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actually get a lot of the advantages that the old system had in spite of the
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dysfunction?](conversation://Mara/hmm)
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[Yep! Realistically though you can get around this by using exact sha256 hashes
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of the precise Docker image you want, however this isn't the _default_ behavior
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so nobody will really know about it. There are ways to work around this with
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tools like Nix, but that is a topic for another day.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
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This is what the devops experience feels like, chaining together tools that
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require careful handling to avoid accidental security flaws in ways that the
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traditional sysadmin team approach fundamentally avoided by design. By
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sidestepping the sysadmin team's stability and process, you learn nothing from
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what they were doing.
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[This is all of course assuming that at the same time as you go devops, you also
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avow the grandeur of the cloud. Statistics say that these two usually go hand in
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hand as the cloud is sold to executives as good for
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devops.](conversation://Cadey/coffee)
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As for how to get out of this mess though, I'm not sure. Like I said, this is a
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_social_ problem that is trying to be solved through a _business organizational_
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fix. I am a technical solutions kind of person and as such I'm really not the
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right person to ask about all this. I don't want to propose a solution here.
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I've thought out several ideas, but I got nowhere with them fast.
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I remember at one of my jobs where I was a devops I ended up also having to be
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the tutor on how fundamental parts of the programming language they are using
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work. This one service that was handling a lot of production load had issues
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where it would just panic and die randomly when a very large customer was trying
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to view a list of things that was two orders of magnitude larger than other
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customers that use that service. I eventually ended up figuring out where the
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issue was but then I had an even harder time explaining what concurrency does at
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a fundamental level and how race conditions can make things crash due to
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undefined behavior. I think it ended up being a 3 line fix too.
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I guess the thing that would really help with this is education and helping
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people hone their skills as developers. I understand that there's a learning
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curve and not everyone is going to become a programming god overnight, but every
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little bit sets off butterfly effects that will ripple down in other ways. Any
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solution that requires everyone be a programming god isn't viable for anyone,
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including programming gods.
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[This whole mentorship thing only really works when the company you work for
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doesn't de-facto punish you for mentoring people like that. If you aren't
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careful about how you frame this, doing that could make it difficult for you to
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prove yourself come review time. "Helped other people do their jobs better"
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doesn't really look good for a promotion committee.](conversation://Numa/delet)
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[Yeah but what are you supposed to do if that kind of mentorship is what really
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helps motivate you as a person and is what you really enjoy doing? I don't
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really see "mentor" as a job title on any postings.](conversation://Mara/hmm)
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[There's always getting tired of trying to change things from within and then
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writing things out on a publicly visible blog, building up a bunch of articles
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over time. Then you could use that body of work as a way to meme yourself into
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hiring pipelines thanks to people sharing your links on aggegators like the
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orange site. It'd probably help if you also got a reputation as a shitposter,
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usually when people are able to openly joke about something that signals that
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they are pretty damn experienced in it.](conversation://Numa/stare)
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[You're describing this blog aren't you.](conversation://Cadey/facepalm)
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Like I said though, this is hard. A lot of the problems are actually structural
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problems in how companies do the science part of computer science. Structural
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problems cannot be solved overnight. These things take time, effort and patience
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to truly figure out and in the process you will fail to invent a light bulb many
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times over. Devops is probably a necessary evil, but I really wish that
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situations weren't toxic enough in the first place to require that evil.
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