DevOps, huh? Show me the money. Show me the MONAY!

Its amazing..

A common response when asked "What would you do if you had a time machine?" is "travel back and assassinate hitler!"

Not me.. My hit list is as follows

1) The person who coined the term "DevOps"

2) The person who coined the term "Cloud"

3) The person who thought "Flash" was a good idea

4) The person who coined the term "-as-a-Service"

The article highlights the major issue...

The enormous amount of bullshit bingo we have to deal with in IT these days... Constantly being tortured with new terms that are merely new labels for old ideas with a slightly different spin, is sooo tiring. Especially if every other self proclaimed expert on the interwebs gives you their take on it and why everybody must adopt it now. Even worse so, when market research firms get involved, because then we have to read it all on a grassroot level while at the same time explaining it to non-technical people in the organisation (the levels above).

It happened with Whathaveyou-as-a-Service, the Cloud, Devops, and lots of other terms. And everybody has a slightly different take on it. An OpenStack cloud is fundamentally differnt than, for example, AWS. Many VPS providers call themselves clouds, but have no actual failover abilities.

Devops even worse; you get 5 opinions when you ask only 3 people, at least. And everybody feels the urge to share their perceived truth about it with world & dog. Add to that the recruitment sector, where you find "Devops Consultants" these days -- apart from never having worked hands-on in IT, they certainly don't grasp any concept involved either. That doesn't keep them from getting on everybody's nerves, though.

Scratch the buzzwords, look at the technology and possible approaches to solving the problem at hand, and you will get somewhere. Deliberating the meaning of buzzwords on the other hand, or their future, doesn't get you anywhere. Maybe those terms are there to stay, maybe not. Who cares. The elements that work will stay where they work, the rest will be forgotten about as soon as the next buzzword comes along to keep all the "gurus" happy. And I'm sure they'll share their "insights" with us when the time comes, while we got on with our lives in the meantime.

Edit to add: The article attracted a whopping 4 comments after 3 hours. That should give El Reg an idea just how sick and tired many readers are of these buzzwords...

The buzzwords aren't going anywhere much as we (I) might want them to.

Get on the gravy train, keep your skills sharp, get paid for doing whatever it is you already did just with the new buzzword label on it, and ensure you keep your eye out for the next one that CIOs worldwide are justifying their existence with.

Me? I'm going DIGITAL. DIGITAL all the things!!!!

High salaries? Likely not...

DevOps is a culture shift, but it's also a role shift. It's a way to allow a company to not pay for operations staff, while simultaneously allowing their developers to pump out releases faster than the traditional ops cycles would allow. It's true that traditional badly run IT operations groups are an impediment to getting anything done. However, DevOps' promise is allowing developers to safely roll stuff out. The reality is that people who understand _both_ coding and the systems their code runs on are very hard to find in the same person. I know developers who can't even take care of their own PCs, and I know systems admins (not very good ones) who can't throw together scripts to automate tasks.

Do I think it's a buzzword or fad? Partially...no doubt there are lots of high-dollar consultancies, books authored and conferences based on it. I guarantee there are tons of magic wand wavers out there selling their services to CIOs for massive sums. But -- as companies start either moving their stuff to public clouds or making their traditional data centers look more like public clouds, I think there will be less of a line between the pure developer who throws code over the wall and the pure sysadmin who mounts the blobs provided by developers on the appropriate server. There has to be some crossover. I just wish I didn't have to call myself a "DevOps Specialist" or provide my skills "as-a-service" to be heard.

Will there be high salaries? Not likely. Whether you're a "rockstar" dev or a "guru" systems guy, the long term trend is downward. There's offshoring, outsourcing, commoditization, the shift to public cloud, and all sorts of other factors. I don't think it's going to turn into a minimum wage job, but it's sure going to look different. People in the US and Europe who work for big companies are just going to be driving a team of thousands of random offshore people or brokering requests between cloud providers. People who work for small companies are just going to wear all the hats, all the time, for less money. That said, the short term payoff for being a PowerPoint jockey at one of the DevOps consultancies or writing yet another wrapper tool will be high until the dust settles down and business as usual commences.

Maybe the drive behind "DevOps" is that as there is no formal qualification with that name in the UK there can be no local expertise, hence providing another justification for importing 'qualified' staff from abroad.

As career buzzwords go, you’d struggle to find one that trumps DevOps judging by the number of conferences, software tools and books ads flooding the Reg. market.

There. Fixed that for you.

Yep

We're fucked.