Operations is not Developer IT.

Oh fuck yes I identify with this so much. I spend so much time debugging developer problems that I should never even see, should never even be brought to my attention.

Yet as the years go on the number of developers who approach me and say “this worked on my laptop, it doesn’t work in the test environment, why” has steadily increased. Often they have not even bothered to do basic troubleshooting, things like read the documentation on what the error message is attempting to tell you. Sometimes I don’t even get an error message in these reports, just a development saying “this page doesn’t load for me now but it did before”. The number of times I have sent a full-time Node developer a link to the Node.js docs is too high.

I’ve done this, and solved all sorts of bugs in applications and deployment/development tools I don’t use, know little to nothing about, and should have no reason to ever look at.

Despite the bullshit about how this was going to empower us to do “our best work faster”, the results have been clear. Operations is drowning, forced to learn both all the fundamentals their peers had to learn (Linux, networking, scripting languages, logging and monitoring) along with one or more cloud providers (how do network interfaces attach to EC2 instances, what are the specific rules for how to invalidate caches on Cloudfront, walk me through IAM Profiles). On top of all of that, they need to understand the abstraction on top of this abstraction, the nuance of how K8 and AWS interact, how storage works with EBS, what are you monitoring and what is it doing. They also need to learn more code than before, now often expected to write relatively complicated internal applications which manage these processes.

The knowledge and skills required to do the same job I did 10 years ago have increased by about 10x-15x — that is, you have to know about 10-15 times as many technologies and master that many more skills to do the same work we did then. It’s insane. I’m near my cognitive limits now and I’m very smart. I’ve seen people leave my field because they simply could not handle the greatly-increased complexity any longer. I’d say my field used to require maybe a minimum 110 IQ and now it requires probably 130 to even play. To be actually good, it’s higher.

This is largely MBA-driven, by the way. It’s (mostly) not the fault of developers, though many devs tend to be cocky jerks who never think anything is their responsibility. That said, MBAs are the ones who have collapsed teams, reduced headcount, thrown out QA while attempting to push developers to release features faster and then made operations people (me) be developer IT and generalized QA for things developers don’t want to understand or think about.