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The problem with the Eulogy for DevOps is that the last 20 years has been a series of ways of defining sysadmins away and then having them re-emerge from the muck.

We'll never have DevOps disappear because it'll just be yet another beast.

Sysadmin, DevOps, SRE, Infrastructure Engineer, it's all the same thing, it's just that people need to try to put us in new boxes to try to get around the fact that *making your systems reliable* is a hard and different job.

Bob Young :verified:
Bob Young :verified:  
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"...making your systems reliable is a hard and different job."
This resonates with me, and I want to share one of my experiences with you.
I was hired as CISO at a company where the CISO reports to the CIO. (I think this messed up, and I'll never do it again).

The CIO had a background in software and apps, and was totally clueless about infrastructure and network protocols.

In my mind, the job of a CIO is, first and foremost, creating and maintaining an infrastructure that's appropriate to the needs of the business. The software? Sure, use whatever software you need, but it'll be worthless if you don't design a proper infrastructure to support it.

But anyway, that short-lived engagement was a revelation to me: there are people in IT who think that the software is everything. They don't even value the infrastructure, and can't comprehend how the infrastructure affects the performance of the software.

silverwizard
silverwizard  

@Bob Young :verified: yeah! People think the network is just bits! That's the goal of all the virtualization and containers to make it that way.

It's why, I think, network, security, and systems people burn out so much. The things we value so strongly are treated as simply software delivery, not complicated (and often beautiful) themselves.

@Bob Young :verified:
sungo
sungo  
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The one title I miss is Systems Programmer. It was close to what we call infra eng now but closer to the metal. "I can wrangle servers and operating systems and shit. but that awful sentient posix shell script holding thing together? yeah that's mine." (it was also before everyone needed to be an "engineer" for ego reasons)
silverwizard
silverwizard  
@sungo I never wanted to Program and that's the thing I find annoying about the whole thing. But I *get it*. That work is valuable and the push it to pretend it's not real!
@sungo
sungo
sungo  
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that’s why we had that title. “systems administrators” didn’t program. “systems programmers” did. “programmers” did, well, wtf programmers do to make my life grumpy
Aleksandar Todorović
Aleksandar Todorović  
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I've been at the same place for the past 4 years. My title has changed 3x. I'm still doing essentially the same thing, just on a different level of abstraction.

What makes it even funnier is that you haven't even listed my current job title: Platform Engineer. What will it be in two years? Who knows, it's all based on vibes.

silverwizard
silverwizard  
@Aleksandar Todorović I usually look for SRE or Infrastructure these days, but it's a total crapshoot and half the time they offer me "devops" as my job title
@Aleksandar Todorović
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