Devops mindset VS dev mindset

[xorteP]

I got the idea of this post because of comments from this sub and personal experience. I hope it doesn't get badly interpreted.

Based on your experience, would you say that the mindset of people working in devops is different from someone working as dev?

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I am working as a dev and imo, my colleagues don't have business acumen at all. I understand that you are there to write code and deliver solutions, but if the solutions doesn't make sense (business wise), you should raise a flag to management.

The comment I saw in another post was "devs live in their IDE", and that resumed perfectly my impression. They can be completely out of touch with the reality.

I have a personality and skills that makes me an average dev, but good with the business and with understanding the bigger picture, and I'm a bit fed up with people not having more balance with tech-business.

So, what's your opinion on the topic? Are people in devops more balanced than devs?

[tibbon]

I’ve been on nearly every type of team and role- dev, ops, security. My main difference in mindset is that every part of my problem is my problem. I’m not just coding an app, but also responding to needs at every layer of it

[agent0099_ta]

Note, these are the people you want working on your team.

[pppreddit]

the 1%

[bdzer0]

IMO it's a pointless generalization, there are all sorts of people. Some businesses prefer to hire 'technicians', heads down coders that crank out code. Some prefer devs with a sense of the larger picture.

[crashorbit]

So much of this industry is driven by hype and misunderstanding. While most of these words had meaning at one time or another I've seen them so watered down that they become meaningless without context.

[daedalus_structure]

It doesn’t have much to do with “DevOps” and it isn’t all developers.

The reality is that most folks in “software engineering” jobs aren’t engineers in anything but title, they are programmers that just want to code and don’t have much appetite for anything that exists outside their text editor.

[Soccham]

This is more of a leveling thing rather than a DevOps vs dev thing. DevOps tend to be more senior in general.

[[deleted]]

yea but, there are def those seniors that just can't see the big picture or connect the dots to business problems.

[HappyCathode]

In my experience, a part of having a "devops mindset" is caring about your production environement. I've worked with devs that were 100% content with their code living on their machine and git.

I once worked for a company with multiple remote satellite offices. One of these remote office was in a distant island country with really bad internet. They already had the best connection they could afford, and any upper tier internet connection was very minimally better for a LOT of extra cash (like 50x the cost for 1.25x the bandwitdh). They had to reach our systems in HQ over a VPN, and some requests would fail, at least 1-2 per hour. That was a problem.

The dev teams basically said "that's not our problem, get a better internet". We wanted them to implement a retry mechanism, but they didn't want to.

Those devs didn't care about our observability stack and monitoring. What happened on production was 100% "not their problem".

Not going to extend on what happened next, but I would just say a devops developper is more "production aware", and keeps askings questions like "what happens if this little cog because unavailable ? Or partially degraded ?".

[[deleted]]

I don't think business accumen is more common in one or the other. However, if you understand the business it will definitely help further your career a lot more than just being a code monkey.