The first thing you’ll likely hear about moving to DevOps is that it’s not about specific tools or technologies, but about “culture.”
and talking total bollocks...
Learn a scripting language and play nicely: How to get a DevOps job
You’ve almost certainly heard about DevOps and the fact there’s a skills shortage. One study by data virtualisation specialist Delphix reckoned the most implemented DevOps initiatives include virtual databases, agile data masking and continuous deployment. That's opportunity, right? If you want to muscle in on the DevOps …
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Friday 6th May 2016 10:08 GMT J Bourne
talking bollocks 2
Have an upvote
' Ruby, Python or Go' Ok, so I've heard of Ruby, can use Python - but isn't 'Go' an ancient game?
'Chef, Puppet and Ansible' Ainsley Harriot? Sooty? wtf???
'Docker, Kubernetes, Nomand' ....
The problem with IT today is finding names for things that actually mean something useful or indicative of what it is. So many names of things in IT are now so separated from the thing itself they have no useful meaning
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Friday 6th May 2016 13:24 GMT Naselus
Re: talking bollocks 2
Go is Google's take on C, because apparently there weren't enough versions and derivatives of C already. Just like every other 'new' C, it's apparently intended to improve clarity and productivity, because nothing makes programming faster and more comprehensible than needing to learn yet another new language that's confusingly close to, but not mutually intelligible with, the last one your learned, and having to do this every 5 years.
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Friday 6th May 2016 15:08 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
This has been bugging me, so I checked:
Bismarck never said that.
It's actually a line from a play by Hanns Johst. The play is called Schlageter, and Johst wrote it in 1933 to celebrate Hitler being appointed Reichskanzler. Which may explain why this quote is sometimes attibuted to Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels.
So yeah, maybe a little consideration about at which time, place and context quoting this is called for.
The only connection to Bismarck I can see is that Bismarck also held the position of Reichskanzler, but this was from 1871 to 1890.
EDIT : Quentin North beat me to it! Have an upvote, Quentin, but I think I won't include the tradtional pint icon on this one.
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Friday 6th May 2016 14:22 GMT Quentin North
The phrase is an often-mistranslated quotation commonly attributed to Hermann Göring -- "When I hear the word 'culture', that's when I reach for my revolver" -- the actual quote is "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" This translates as: "Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!" In fact, it is a line uttered by the character Thiemann in Act 1, Scene 1 of the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst.
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Friday 6th May 2016 09:01 GMT Mr Humbug
Now I understand ...
DevOps just means the IT general practitioner. The jack of all trades who gets the whole thing working and finds where it's broken. I think I've been doing DevOps for 25 years.
PS. I think the article missed out the word 'holistic'. I'm sure holistic should be very important for DevOps
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Friday 6th May 2016 09:30 GMT Pascal Monett
Indeed. This whole article is just an official announcement to learn the lingo and what the dance steps are.
Sysadmin who is supposed to be able to code ? I don't know one who doesn't, personally. Nor do I know any sysadmin worth a damn who isn't fully aware of what is running on his network and how it works - well enough to fix issues most of the time, that is.
For me this article is a confirmation : DevOps is just the new moniker for what competent people have been doing since IT was birthed.
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Friday 6th May 2016 11:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Sysadmin who is supposed to be able to code ? I don't know one who doesn't, personally."
Well, just as there's different levels of sys admin (knowing how to edit /etc/hosts vs rebuilding a kernel) there are different levels of coding. Most sysadmins can write a shell or python script to do some job control but I wouldn't trust many of them to implement a B+ tree library in C.
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Friday 6th May 2016 15:03 GMT wheelybird
I wouldn't trust many developers I know to write a a B+ tree library in C. But then this shows a flawed mindset; why not use one of the pre-existing B+ tree libraries?
There are different levels of coding with developers too, you see. I know sysadmins that code better than a good proportion of developers.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 11:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
"I wouldn't trust many developers I know to write a a B+ tree library in C. But then this shows a flawed mindset; why not use one of the pre-existing B+ tree libraries?"
If a developer couldn't write such a library I wouldn't count them as particularly good. And as for using libraries - fine for 99% of cases but there are always edge cases that need some internal tweek that would be hard to do with a library.
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Monday 9th May 2016 15:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Most sysadmins can write a shell or python script to do some job control but I wouldn't trust many of them to implement a B+ tree library in C."
And I think that highlights a good point, already touched-on but worth noting: every good Sysadmin I know is able to script pretty well, often in multiple languages both old and new.
But none (and I'll include myself among them) would call themselves a "programmer". None would be able (or even want) to code up a new application in C, at least not without a lot of effort and learning.
To my mind, Sysadmins script stuff to remove repetition, solve a problem, maybe even provide a tool or utility that will make a task easier for themselves and other systems types. Programmers do that kind of thing too, but tend to write applications for consumption by end-users, if not sales & marketing and ultimately, paying customers.
It's not an absolute line of course; I've also known Sysadmins who coded up nice web apps for the whole department to use, and DB programs that finance relied on. As OP said, those tend to be more rare, from the skillset standpoint as well as what they'd rather be working on anyway.
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Monday 9th May 2016 16:48 GMT Naselus
"But none (and I'll include myself among them) would call themselves a "programmer". "
This, really. Have an upvote.
If you think knowing some basic programming makes you a programmer, then you're kinda missing the point. Programmers don't go off and spend 4 or 5 years at uni just learning basic syntax and vocabulary. There's a lot of theory work in programming - optimization, security stuff, understanding how threading works etc - which a sysadmin I don't need to know in detail, but a programmer would.
Likewise, there's a lot of specific knowledge in systems admin work that a programmer doesn't need to know about. Network security alone has a pathway of certs that is more taxing than a 5-year degree. A real understanding of just the MS network infrastructure takes years, let alone storage architectures or networking. These are areas where only a few programmers (usually those directly involved in writing for exactly software directly related to these things) have more than a cursory understanding.
So sure, a programmer may be able to build a computer from components given three tries, or plug a few network cables into a router and manually assign some IP addresses, or successfully install a Windows client and maybe even set up a VM on Hyper-V. But that doesn't make him capable of doing a sysadmin's job. And a sys admin might be able to string together a Javascript GUI for an SQL DB, or automate a hundred simple tasks with a bunch of 5-10 line script files, or even write a calculator program given a week to think about it with nothing else to do, but that doesn't make him a programmer. An enthusiastic self-taught amateur might be able to give himself a stupid title and do a bit of both... but that doesn't make him a combination of the two. It makes him a man writing shitty code and running it on a poorly configured environment, because he doesn't understand either area.
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Friday 6th May 2016 13:54 GMT Naselus
Re: Now I understand ...
"DevOps just means the IT general practitioner."
Not really, since 'Devops' presently doesn't mean a damn thing tbh.
My official job title is 'ICT Support and Development Engineer", which means that yes, I'm the 'general IT practitioner' that you refer to; I write some basic programs, do a lot of automation, but also handle the entire operations admin work on the netapps, Vsphere and the entire MS stack. Also, because my job title implies I'm both a support dude (sysadmin) ad a development dude (programmer), I'm getting a massive number of calls from recruiters offering devops positions right now. And do you know what these jobs have in common?
Nothing.
Literally nothing. Some are basically Cloud Architect jobs. Others are bog-standard sysadmin work; another was actually fairly obviously just a Java dev job; yet another is what we would've called an application manager 5 years ago, another is really a DBA. A Devops job spec is a complete black box; it could contain literally anything. It's like loading a shotgun full of IT terms and just firing it at a target, and anything that lands in the central 2 rings is part of the spec.
This is why it initially appears to be a general IT practitioner's job; it's so absurdly general that you can jam almost anything into Devops. It homogenizes all IT job descriptions into either 'Engineer' or 'Manager' without making any attempt to distinguish between skill and techs at all. And that's going to be a huge problem after a couple of years, when everyone is calling themselves a Devops Engineer but they have no skills in common at all - no more 'linux systems administrator' or 'Java front-end developer', both are now 'devops engineers' with no alteration to their skillset whatsoever.
IT's basically just part of the ongoing progression of the whole of Western civilization toward just having two job titles - "master" and "servant".
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Thursday 12th May 2016 03:19 GMT TheOtherHobbes
Re: Now I understand ...
>And do you know what these jobs have in common?
DevOps means "Talks to computers (and sometimes they talk back.)"
It's like being a horse trainer for things with blinky lights.
Specifics? Just keep it working, there's a good chap, so I don't have to worry about it at the golf course.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 13:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Now I understand ...
"The jack of all trades who gets the whole thing working and finds where it's broken. "
Indeed. It is most amusing that the breadth and depth of skills needed for that role were largely lost when many Baby Boomers were sidelined and then retired. They were told that "productisation" was the new skill - requiring specialisation in gaining and maintaining manufacturer's certification.
Youngsters, no matter how eager initially, soon learned that specialisation was the way to career and salary progression. The old fundi in the corner was largely ignored ...until there was a technical crisis when the specialists were all saying "no problem in my area".
No one can hope to be competent in all things. They need to be able to assimilate what specialists are saying - and translate that for other specialists. That needs breadth and depth of previous experience - and that doesn't come cheap in the number of hours spent "playing". You can't send people on courses when the need arises - and hope they will be able to think laterally.
Most people can code - most people can't write good software. A common problem is that they don't think defensively - the necessary contingency handling is often 80% of the task. They also have single track minds - rarely looking beyond their limited perspective at lateral possibilities - or timing races..
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Friday 6th May 2016 09:06 GMT Doctor_Wibble
Not asking much then?
So the requirements are to be super lovely people with a super broad range of skills and super flexibility to learn even more skills without needing to take a break? I think I met one of those once, about 20 years ago. And of course we are all large corporates because anyone smaller doesn't have the luxury of being able to randomly swap around the Dev and Ops staff just for the 'broadening of experience'. Normally you get given a pile of books ans told "well volunteered, you get to be the standby, learn this in your own time".
Oh, and "hampering after"? Really? Are you sending out a large basket to capture people and wrap them in a gingham picnic blanket or did you mean "hankering"?
p.s. as remarked above 'DevOps' does have similarities to an IT GP (good name!) though the IT-GP would tend to be the solo small company tech person rather than this new desire for a team of randomly interchangeable bricks in the wall, sorry I mean valuable tech personnel...
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Friday 6th May 2016 10:43 GMT Tim 11
Re: Not asking much then?
" Isn't there some kind of axiom about "Jack of all trades"? "
yes there is but in my experience it's almost universally false in computing. Someone who can turn their hand to many different things is usually better at any one of them than someone who can only do that one thing.
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Friday 6th May 2016 11:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not asking much then?
"yes there is but in my experience it's almost universally false in computing. "
And my experience is the complete opposite. To become really good at something you have to practice it and practice precludes doing 101 different tasks. f I want someone to implement Voronoi diagram algorithm in C++ I need someone who's an expert in their field and on the ball - not some guy who's done a bit of everything but not a large amount of anything and might be able to knock together a "hello world" program given a day or 2.
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Friday 6th May 2016 12:45 GMT Helldesk Dogsbody
Re: Not asking much then?
@Tim 11 and boltar: I suspect that you're both right, for a given value of right. For the environment I'm in, as there are fewer than 10 of us, a JOAT is a better call much of the time. All of us have areas where our knowledge base is a little more developed but none of us are specialists, we hire those in for a given job when required. YMMV but that seems to work for the numbers we have. I imagine that in a 30 or 40 strong team it would be the opposite case.
Re the quote, it always irks me that people only mention the first couplet as it's then completely out of context:
"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one."
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Tuesday 10th May 2016 16:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not asking much then?
@Boltar,
You are of course right, but then you would try not to ask a generalist to do what is clearly a specialised task, even if he or she could probably learn it, given time. Unless of course said specialist was unavailable, and there was no other choice, no time to find specialist (or no budget).
Many "IT generalists" (I hate that term) can learn new tasks and still do tasks that give many "boxed-in" specialists the heebie-jeebies:
Source, install and configure the tools, platforms, hardware
Help debug and set up software test environments,
Troubleshoot performance issues.
Ensure and monitor that sufficient resources are available for those precious C++ apps.
Build VMs and set up cloudy systems and networks
Write test and user docs,
Learn new things, as required
Relearn old forgotten things, as required.
Script much of the above.
Deal effectively with users and PHBs
Maintain project plans
yada, yada, yada
Specialists will always need generalists (and vice versa) to get projects done.
Today, there is very little room left for caste-driven separation within IT teams (devs vs sysadmins).
It just slows things down and makes grumpy old farts look even grumpier and older.
Do what you are good at and learn as much as you can from people with specific skills you don't have. You too can become a gifted "generalist" and start earning those big bucks everyone is talking about.
At the end of the day, it is still about experience and adaptability and always has been.
Most projects don't actually require rocket scientist skills anymore and if they do, there will soon be an app for it.
So you can call me a devop if you like, ..... just don't call me late for dinner
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Friday 6th May 2016 11:27 GMT tiggity
Re: Not asking much then?
Theres some areas where the specialist shows their worth, e.g. if you are working with a very large database backend e.g. petabyte level with high concurrency, lots of transactions etc, then you get the DB specialist in to configure the servers, tweak the DB design and to help with the query strategies to use (not just the obvious such as appropriate use (lets assume a SQL DB in this e.g.) of prepared statements but using their knowledge to tweak tables, indexes, SQL syntax to get the best performance - e.g. to get certain data out there's often many possible ways you could write queries, your proper expert on that DB knows which one(s) are likely best candidates & which will crawl.
Using the DB expert suggestions avoids the hassle of having to trial all the alternatives and run benchmarking tests, instead you can just focus on testing a small subset of possibilities that the expert has picked out.
The sort of bad design, flawed queries, unnoticed deadlocks people often get away with on small DB systems are killers when things are scaled up big time.
N.B. Not talking as the DB expert but as someone who has collaborated with them to deliver solutions that make good use of the particular DB backend used.
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Friday 6th May 2016 20:01 GMT Chris King
Re: "Jack of all trades"
I also fit the JOAT description - or as someone else described me, "Designated Grown-Up for Projects that Need One".
Someone else said "You're like that five-year-old kid that every Evil Overlord should employ, to make sure that their plans don't have inherent flaws".
I may not have the depth of knowledge that "Mission Specialists" bring to a team, but a broad overview means that I tend to spot flaws they don't. It also means that if a project is missing vital knowledge or experience, I know who to approach to fix that.
Bloody hell, does that mean I've also been doing DevOps most of my career ? Ewww.
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Friday 6th May 2016 10:03 GMT Roq D. Kasba
Re: There's a skills shortage
Because it's not really a thing. It's some consultant-led business bullshit wrapped around 'Don't master any trades, fudge by in all'. This is so the consultants can sell the actual expertise when it turns out that a tier 1 helpdesk guy can't fix a timing flaw in your message queue-oriented Oracle system.
It'll pass, and it'll be repainted and repackaged - fashions shift. You'll do more or less the same whilst some higher-ups scurry about with meaningless graphs they can't interpret on big screens. It always happens. The wheels keep turning. Nothing will improve, things will change. What's centralised will diversify and vice versa.
If you want to get ahead in DevOps, realise that you'll do the same thing, people paid more than you won't implement anything properly and call in consultants paid more than you. You'll get bollocked for things you don't understand but which were dumped on you, but won't get fired as whoever is bollocking you realises they'll look like an idiot too. Young people who say the right words to the numpties will get promoted ahead of you, but then find out they know squat about squat and you'll end up fixing their stuff. However, you'll sacrifice chickens every morning, or bow to the 60" monitor with meaningless graphs, or whatever the superstition of the day is.
If you want to THRIVE in DevOps, get onto the reporting TV system stuff and make it show pretty graphs. Start off with random data that looks good and award yourself points for every month it goes unnoticed.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 05:54 GMT John F***ing Stepp
Re: There's a skills shortage
Sounds like server admin 101. Run tail -f on the server log so it actually appears you are doing something, screw with the log in script so the MFC encounters the random core dump (yeah, that's listed under RFC whatever, schedule us some over time and we will get it fixed)
And of course. . .
Keep the cattle prod charged.
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Friday 6th May 2016 10:03 GMT 1Rafayal
This is just a report that the Reg has taken the money for, again they have put zero effort into publishing something that has anything to do with dev ops at all.
Reg, can you either stop with these glorified adverts or get someone in who know what devops actually is to help you write a decent article?
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Friday 6th May 2016 10:05 GMT Camilla Smythe
Ah but....
This is just DevOps01 so for the moment, whilst paying passing attention such that you can carry on doing your job as normal when someone uses the language of DevOps01 to ask you to do your job as normal, you need not be overly concerned. It's when the buzz moves onto DevOps02 that you really need to start paying attention and talking the talk along with the others in the short time window before it turns into DevOps-O-Rhea after which everyone gets bored and moves onto DevOpsAAS or some other Fad.
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Friday 6th May 2016 15:11 GMT wheelybird
A nonsense
This is a nonsense. If DevOps is supposed to mean *anything* it's supposed to mean a form of collaboration between dev and ops which allows everyone to do their job as painlessly as possible, be happy and fulfilled in life and churn out crappy software updates on a weekly/daily/hourly basis in order to fix the last crappy software update you did.
You don't have such a thing as a DevOps 'role'. You still work either in dev or ops. It's supposed to be about getting the procedures and toolkits right.
So telling someone that they need to learn how to be a developer and a sysadmin at the same time suggests that whichever paid-per-word pseudo tech journalist drone wrote this "article" knows less about DevOps than the average CTO.
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Friday 6th May 2016 17:14 GMT Dadmin
Re: A nonsense
Thank you, and thank ALL of you for poo-pooing this whole thing! You are making it quite easy for me to step into a brand new role and leave all you idiots scratching your heads and making silly noises. I am making the same cash as I get in Silicon Valley, the place I grew up and helped build, and I did it with every single one of the points expressed in this article. You can feel like a "big admin" in your tiny fucking "data center" and keep doing what you're doing. If you make good money and never want to grow, sounds like you're already there. Yes, we've ALL been doing devops this whole fucking time. I've been doing it for about a dozen years, about half of my total years in IT. I can't begin to tell you how heartwarming it is to hear grown admins bitching about something that is an absolute opportunity to grow your skills set and do some fun cross-functional work. Sure, I am not the world's best coder, but I am very good at every Unix/Linux shell, Perl, Go, Python. All those boxes ticked, and ticked with honor, not with, "yeah, I touched it once." You are my favorite group of saddos! My alleged peers... just like my previous gig where this stupid, fat, douche of a creature, not even sure this thing was a human being, just a load of horseshit poured into a giant overall meant for a circus clown, but I digress. No, this guy was just like most of you; College C comp sic grad, and that was it. He never really developed any real software, but you wouldn't know that by talking, rather listening to his endless stories about his good old days. Here's the clue; he never was a lead programmer, and clearly such a fucking pain in the ass that every company he worked for stuck this shithead into the build room and made him just build the releases, not any of the real code. Super good at telling us how we only ever need to program in C/Perl and shell. Fucking useless in a fast moving environment, and it showed. He never delivered any of his projects, and I got to step in and learn a bit of golang and the lowly SaltStack, and then I just changed my title to Devops Lead Admin and here I am. Again, I say that this is contained in this article you're passing off as a fad. The cloud must also be a fad. HAHA! You pinheads are handing admins and devs like me free work! You're ancient brain can't comprehend any new thing, or rather any new thing must be crap, unless YOU thought of it. Sound familiar? It should, you're soaking in it.
So, good people who claim to be "IT Professionals" I bid you a fond Friday and a hearty fuck you, you fucking morons! HAHA! I'm sitting around after a nice second week in the war room doing devops at a company ALL of you know VERY well, and I'm just laughing my ass off at all you wrong-think luddites pretending to be tech wizards of our future. Shame on you again. Go change you're fucking password, dildos! I'm guessing it's a English set of words, with some numbers and perhaps funny characters thrown in that will be easy pickings for any cracker with a small to medium sized rainbow table. You guys fucking failed again. Get over yourself or just stay in your cave at the little site you call big. :P
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Friday 6th May 2016 16:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
What?
I don't get the stock photo: her spectacles have tape wrapped around the nose bridge, yet their straightness of the frame shows they are structurally sound, so why the tape at all? Her mouth is open in some sort of odd smile/grimace mixture so it's unclear what emotion she is feeling. Is she happy? sad? in pain? Is she some sort of victim of something? No idea. Is this a joke, because if so, it isn't funny. She seems to be wearing an odd granny-like blouse too. Why?
And I don't get the article: it's the 500th (or so) article about a subject that only around five people in the world are remotely interested in and even those five they can't agree what it means, or why it's important. I'm almost missing the storage and container epics we used to suffer.
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Monday 9th May 2016 13:13 GMT dajames
Re: What?
I don't get the stock photo: her spectacles have tape wrapped around the nose bridge, yet their straightness of the frame shows they are structurally sound, so why the tape at all?
Just like DevOps ... Nothing is broken, so do we really need a new way to mend it?
That photo, though .... the image is called "broken glass girl" (note: not "broken glasses girl") but it is not the glass of her glasses that is broken.
Just like DevOps ... it completely misses the point.
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Friday 6th May 2016 20:42 GMT energystar
DevOps are fine, Rachel
Used to be more of a DevOp more than anything [When that Tag didn't even exist].
Problem is [on extreme use of allegories] a Health System trying to use nurses, homeopaths, intractable 3d world 'alternative' drugs. To conceptualize, integrate, design, procure, implement, supervise and maintain what contemporaneously amounts to CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 13:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
It is most amusing that the breadth and depth of skills needed for the Dev Ops role were largely lost when many Baby Boomers were sidelined and then retired. They were told that "productisation" was the new skill - requiring specialisation in gaining and maintaining manufacturer's certification.
Youngsters, no matter how eager initially, soon learned that specialisation was the way to career and salary progression. The old fundi in the corner was largely ignored ...until there was a technical crisis when the specialists were all saying "no problem in my area".
No one can hope to be competent in all things. They need to be able to assimilate what specialists are saying - and translate that for other specialists. That needs breadth and depth of previous experience - and that doesn't come cheap in the number of hours spent "playing". You can't send people on courses when the need arises - and hope they will be able to think laterally.
Most people can code - most people can't write good software. A common problem is that they don't think defensively - the necessary contingency handling is often 80% of the task. They also have single track minds - rarely looking beyond their limited perspective at lateral possibilities - or timing races.
[yes this is a repeat - a relevant post that sums up what I was telling my bosses for decades before I retired]
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Monday 9th May 2016 05:52 GMT Christian Berger
It seems to me it's there to hold the bottom of the barrel
I mean seriously, an engineer not being able to program probably isn't to smart. If you are interested in technology, you should at least have a bit of knowledge in all fields. I mean I studied electronics and even I calculated the gear ratio of an epicyclic gearing. I surely don't know enough to do anything very useful in those fields of engineering, but I know enough to talk to another engineer.
Programming is not even something hard, it's just being made hard by use of improper tools.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
