Pavan Belagatti

Posted on Mar 29, 2019

“DevOps engineer” is really just a title used to hire sysadmins?

#discuss #dev #devops #ops

Companies are now rebranding their outdated sys admins as "DevOps Engineers" as a quick way to make shareholders happy.

What are your thoughts?

Top comments (15)

David J Eddy • Mar 29 '19

I hate this practice. I applied for, and was hired as a 'SRE' (a 'DevOps' type role) at a company. I should have realized what had happened when my team lead said 'things you are saying are scaring people'. One of the principle mindsets is the willingness to fail, learn, apply guard-rails. They really wanted a network operations person. They had zero to no tolerance for anything less than perfect. The dept. lead went around acting like no-one on his team made mistakes and came down hard when anything was not perfect.

Sorry for the rant but I hate it when a concept is co-opted and bastardized into something is was never meant to be.

/rant

Pavan Belagatti • Mar 30 '19

I understand. I think even organizations don't understand this concept clearly yet, that's the reason they say they are hiring DevOps peeps, but a lot of times, for them, DevOps means you are a Jenkins / code building engineer.

Antonio Radovcic • Mar 29 '19

I thought DevOps was the word for Sysadmins taking care of Deployments etc.

GTB3NW • Mar 29 '19

That's exactly the kind of confusion which makes it understandable that recruiters and HR are bad at labelling the role.

It's a near impossible task to get anyone to agree on the word, but the few things which I've generally seen as accepted are:

It's often given as a job title, when it's actually more of a set of practices
It's a hybrid role between developer and sysadmin
The developer part is more often understanding of development, best practices and building of tooling <- This is the most controversial bit, but I feel this bit or more is required to really be "devops". It has to be a bit further than "able to write bash/python", but it doesn't have to be a full blown developer. I personally find the sysadmin side is more critical for devops and just having an understanding of best practices in development to steer the development teams in the right direction is enough to cross the threshold from sysadmin or developer.

Antonio Radovcic • Mar 29 '19

Thanks!
I have to admit a little ignorance to this field, since in my daily job I'm hardly in touch with deployment, hosting etc., and for my personal projects, Heroku or FTP is usually fine.

GTB3NW • Mar 29 '19

Hey, don't worry about it! I don't equate blissful ignorance to being willfully ignorant. If I could offer any advice to you, it would be to learn a few sysadmin skills. Before my (Cue irony) devops title I was a sysadmin working in the hosting industry and supporting customers. The developers that benefited from us most were the ones who had a few sysadmin skills but wanted support to get further with those. I'm talking understanding of permissions and system resources, webserver configuration, nothing too crazy! 99% of the time they are able to get work done quicker, with less friction and run into less issues. If they were an agency we'd also refer them to customers looking for new developers.

Being able to find logs and debug with system tools is also a bonus!

Pavan Belagatti • Mar 30 '19

And you missed IaC.

Cameron Lepper • Mar 29 '19

My last job started hiring for a DevOps Engineer as I was leaving. It sounded to me like they were after a Sys Admin and not a DevOps Engineer. I've found that, predominantly in non-tech organisations, people are misusing the term DevOps, and falsely believe it's synonymous with Sys Admin. Despite the obvious parallels and overlap, DevOps culture and process extends way beyond just the configuration and upkeep of any ecosystem. I think the scope of DevOps is greater than that of a SysAdmin role, but unfortunately I do agree that many places are rebranding their SysAdmin role as DevOps because it sounds like they're 'keeping up with the times'.

David J Eddy • Mar 29 '19

Preach it!

Jon Bristow • Mar 29 '19

In my experience, anything with “ops” in the title will have Ops work be the overwhelming majority of the work.

e. hashman

@ehashdn

A primer:
Site Reliability Engineers = sysadmins with Go
DevOps Engineers = sysadmins with Ruby
Systems Administrators = sysadmins with Perl

23:51 PM - 20 Oct 2017

18403863

As a ProdDev person, writing scripts is not even close to what my passion for development demands. DevOps centered orgs seem to rarely be interested in investing in building real tools, much less proper requirements gathering and modern project management.

Sure, I bet there are unicorns out there, but for now I’m trying to get back to pure development. With the advent of serverless native services, the amount of operations I need to worry about is shrinking. (Also, CRUD work is getting less and less justifiable as being worthy of dev time, so there are fewer pure coding positions these days.)

Pavan Belagatti • Mar 30 '19

I saw in one Reddit discussion a senior guy saying 'DevOps is infra as code, so it’s devs solving ops problems. What's your view on that.

K • Apr 1 '19

Yes, companies hire DevOps because it's new and fresh.

But DevOps means you Development and Operations in one person.

The core assumption is that deployments work better if the people who wrote the code are also the administrators of that code.

Dave MG • Apr 1 '19 • Edited

This has been my frustrating experience, yes. Even more frustrating was learning once in those environments how so many people in them worked and operated like the future of the company depended on how much they could simultaneously hire Site Reliability Engineers and cargo cult everything from deployments to credentials/env stores and actually get anything done.

Now I wouldn't say I've become jaded or cynical, but only a jaded and cynical person would say what I'm about to: Unless you are getting hired to be operator 1/patient zero for a organization starting right out of the gates and can implement the three ways of DevOps from the start, you're in for a rough or hilarious time. Or both.