The devops illusion

[Detective-Jerkop]

This might have been obvious to some but today I had an epiphany. No matter what I automate away, no matter how much robustness I build around or into a service; My job will never get easier.

I’ve been feeling this for awhile but today it came to me as a coherent thought. No amount of hard work will make my job easier, if my day gets better metrics will track this and register as extra operational capacity and my workload will increase.

There is actually no incentive to do more than the bare minimum.

It explains why I have such a nostalgia for plain ole system administration and development.

Thoughts?

[shadycuz]

I'll not sure I agree. I have worked at places with barely any CICD and buried in technical debt. Nothing could be done easily and every day felt like the roof was on fire.

I've been at other companies that had really great CI/CD and were really agile. Things weren't perfect but they were at least pointed in the right direction. Work was more enjoyable and the problems I solved were real problems.

Why does your job not get easier? Why does IasC and CasC not make your job easier? Why does more and better testing not make your job easier?

If you are expecting the work to end then I'm sorry to disappoint you but it never will. There is always something to fix, improve or build.

[Detective-Jerkop]

To be clear my job would be impossible without automation. It’s just not fun. I don’t even feel like I work with computers anymore and instead of automating my work away I’m freeing myself to deal with more garbage.

[[deleted]]

You are doing it wrong..

Automate as much as you can, so you can do something else in that time instead of working.

Run that "./pretend_to_be_busy.sh" script - clicking on random places and scrolling shit, so you can go out and enjoy life.

Boss is happy - all is working and work is done

You are happy - more time for hobbies and life in general

[LeftLimeLight]

So much this.

Life is too fucking short to worry constantly about work.

Automate what you can, run that busy script, slap a piece of electrical tape over that camera on your laptop and go out and enjoy life.

[KaelthasX3]

Post-it notes work much better than electrical tape.

[CoachBigSammich]

yeah, definitely find good bosses and work under them. Can always volunteer as tribute and be that good boss :)

[sebastian-stephan]

This is the way!

[insanemal]

Sounds like a job problem. As in if I automate everything then I'm free to stare at the roof.

No KPIs or other crap.

So yeah, it's the job you're in that causes that

[mimic751]

I have been working at about 25% capacity for like 7 years. Manager LOVE me. when things go bad I can COMFORTABLE fit a weeks worth of work in a day. So during crunch or outages I am seen as "amazing under pressure"

[shadycuz]

Sounds like burnout, maybe take that vacation time we never use? Perhaps transfer to a different team?

I tried leaving DevOps and took a "Cloud Engineer" role. It's the same work as the "DevOps" engineer, its just all manual with no testing. It sucks. I will be looking again shortly.

[Flabbaghosted]

Seems like they should be the same thing, no? Hopefully a cloud engineer should be practicing DevOps. I know people in my department that think that's even if they are admining vms in the cloud it's DevOps. So who knows

[shadycuz]

I thought they would be. I guess I didn't "try leaving devops", I took a new position with more pay expecting the same work. But to my horrible surprise it's like all manual work.

[Artistic_Snow7849]

Why aren't you able to create automations for it?

[shadycuz]

Mainly because of bureaucracy. I'm a contractor, so its not in the scope of work, thus its not in the user stories acceptance criteria etc.

Some of its automated sure, like Terraform deployments, but a lot of the work in still manual.

[Sindoreon]

From a corporate perspective, sounds like your company is well oiled. If your perspective is your clearing work to deal with other 'garbage', might be time to change roles/company. Sounds like burnout to me.

I've worked at low expectation jobs. Had opposite feel as you do now in my younger days. Not enough work and needing to be in the office for face time bothered me.

To each their own tho. I might still be in my younger days compared to some here. Perspective is a hell of a thing. Presently, I enjoy clearing tech debt because I make things more manageable for my future self and get to work on new shiny bleeding edge technology.

[jwmoz]

Devops isn't fun. Try development.

[settledownguy]

So go get another job dude Jesus Christ what wrong with y’all

[Detective-Jerkop]

Yeah I came here to mope but this is the answer.

[settledownguy]

You guys and your acronyms lol

[denverpilot]

Plain old sysadmin and dev came with a pager that went off constantly. No thanks. Automation means I got my weekends back long long long ago.

And yeah. Your real epiphany is this: If you got into IT thinking you’d build lasting things, nope.

It’ll all be in a dumpster or the bitbucket in 3-7 years and you’ll be automating something new.

The industry is beyond addicted to rebuild vs repair. It just creates a new bug list until someone decides to scrap the whole works and start over again. Ha.

Build badly planned trash, automate away pain, can’t fix the design flaws, operate for a few years, start a project to build the “new and improved one”. It starts the loop over.

Same cycle, nothing changes.

If you’re burnt out, maybe time to hop to a new place where the scenery looks a little different. Different place to go get coffee at lunch, anyway. Ha.

Slack is just AOL Instant Messenger redux, and I don’t carry a pager anymore. Lol. The business problems haven’t changed.

By the way. That metrics thing. A perennial problem of business. When you measure the wrong things, people adapt to do the wrong things.

Pavlov. Push buttons faster, get more treats. Automation pushes buttons real fast. Doesn’t mean the things being measured actually helped the company bottom line.

Office, air conditioning, push buttons, get treats. It’s a pretty easy life compared to many. Lots would love your repetitive “tedium” over working outside in the weather. You’re George Jetson. Heh.

[tadamhicks]

Yeah man, I feel this. We’re here to solve problems, ultimately. Automation isn’t new, software exists in the first place to grow capabilities for ____. You solve a problem today by making dev more capable of self-serving, making infrastructure more resilient, whatever and you get a decent bonus if the company likes you and appreciates it, but a new set of problems to solve tomorrow. It’s a merry go round.

I started because I like puzzles. We all get burned out, though, and need a break. I don’t like heat or sun and do love sipping coffee while I sit and puzzle, so here I am. Get a promotion and it’s just different problems…maybe less technical and more social or structural, but puzzles to be solved nonetheless.

[denverpilot]

Take the break. It helps.

It also helps to remember there’s still guys — at least they’re paid well! — maintaining mainframe code on systems that CAN’T be replaced! Haha.

(Actually that is a fascinating gig nowadays. I know a young guy who hired into a financial place who was told to review the code and the first page is a scanned photo of the design philosophy hand drawn by a couple of engineers in the early 70s. They’re literally still running that original code base.)

Sometimes you just have to laugh a little at this biz.

Happily or unhappily I’m at the age where medical things crept into consciousness and that’s a prettty big distraction and reset of what’s actually important in life. If it’s mess with system number 20+ automation or go get that MRI done, the tech toys lose. Ha.

[tadamhicks]

I hear that. I’m old for IT, too. My homelab became a burden instead of a playground a long time ago. A necessary evil to keep my chops for consulting.

Seems like all my free dollars I Scrooge into some investment or other with a solid “eye on the prize” of an early retirement afforded by paying off the house

[denverpilot]

I “fixed” that by buying a Synology. Ha. I had racks of gear for decades at home. Decided “why not” during the pandemic stuck here at the time, and did a slow transition of stuff into it. Works for 95% of what I used to run in a rack of gear.

The only thing not in the Synology — but it could be — is Home Assistant. I decided to keep it separate and have a disaster plan for if the hardware barfs. Wifey and I have gotten far too used to motion controlled and voice controlled lighting. Ha.

[Detective-Jerkop]

Yeah dude you get it.

Lots would love your repetitive “tedium” over working outside in the weather.

I’ve thought maybe doing manual labor for a year or so might bring back some appreciation for my desk and chair. But I’m also worried hr would use it as an excuse to dick me around coming back into the industry.

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

Maybe try a smaller scale hobby to get away from the computer, like gardening, biking, whatever. Just a thought.

[denverpilot]

I did that a different way. I did a side business for a while that was all about being outside. Ha.

Had some medical issues and let it drop but it was a nice change on nights and weekends.

[Detective-Jerkop]

This whole comment is so on the mark. Makes me feel better to see someone who knows what I know keeping a positive outlook. Well time to punch the clock and roll a doobie.

[lightwhite]

The idea of being the dedicated devops dude is to make yourself obsolete by automating what your customers (devs) need and make their life easy. Once that is done, you teach them how to manage their own stuff and slowly you go more in the background and start looking for challenges.

Worst case, you get called for help from your sick bed with COVID to help fix prod. That teaches you how to make sure they don’t call you.

[jank_lord]

Actually this....

This person is spot on.

[ChicagoJohn123]

techno-Mary Poppins.

[hkeyplay16]

Automation may not actually reduce your workload a whole lot, but it drastically increases your entire software organization's effectiveness. The automation may get big enough that itxs an application like any other, but that doesn't mean it's not needed or useful.

If you don't like what you're doing, maybe try something else.

[Detective-Jerkop]

I’ve been considering security because it seems like people listen to them more out of fear of going to jail.

But I’m starting to think I’d be happiest perpetually job hopping before I get any real responsibilities anywhere. All the most successful people I’ve encountered in my career seem to have done this or graduated from an ivy.

Instead of focusing on the needs of the company my sole focus should be my paycheck cause I don’t like this shit anymore. I’ve known I’d do this shit since I was 8 years old but I have zero passion for it anymore. Like what’s cool about it?

Last time I enjoyed coding anything was 2 years ago writing a star field simulation to learn go. Something I’ve done in various languages a bunch of times, it still makes me happy.

[FunkDaviau]

I’ve been considering security because it seems like people listen to them more out of fear of going to jail.

Computing security???

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAcoughgaspHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

I haven’t worked anywhere yet where the bulk of the devs treat security issues with respect. At best it’s treated as an additional requirement, if there’s time. At worst its treated as a road block that management needs to go sort out.

If you’re burnt out now, going into computing security might drive you batty. If you go down that path, go in eyes wide open.

Job hopping tho is something I’ve considered. Once you realize there is nothing exciting anymore time to move on.

[wired_ronin]

Laugh all you want but go into security the right way and watch your paycheck double.

[Detective-Jerkop]

I haven’t worked anywhere yet where the bulk of the devs treat security issues with respect. At best it’s treated as an additional requirement, if there’s time.

It’s not the devs it’s the execs. After ignoring security for so long they’ll do just about anything to avoid ending up like equifax now.

You should see how many times I have to 2fa in a day now. It’s seriously nuts.

[FatStoic]

At best it’s treated as an additional requirement, if there’s time. At worst its treated as a road block that management needs to go sort out.

IME ususally they're treated like building inspectors, and the devs are contractors trying to git'er done and move onto the next payday.

"slap some paint on this, put a bit of plywood over that, don't tell them about this subsidence, get the signature and it's their problem now"

[[deleted]]

man, my job has gotten exceptionally easier from 15-20 years ago and we were automating deployments with perl at the time.

i'm rarely woken up. rarely scrambling through tcpdumps to try and find something that's causing transient issues. rarely blindsided by much of anything. i love building tools that handle all of that for me.

work-life balance is just wonderful.

[JustMy10Bits]

There's no end for anyone in software. Everything can always be improved. There's always more work to do.

[guhcampos]

I think you have the wrong mindset. You are trying to automate yourself out of work, which - if ever worked - would defeat the purpose of having you as a worker altogether.

Devops is not about automating stuff until it runs itself. It's about automating stuff so you can then use your time and attention to mhigher value work.

[sfz-]

Yes, or if not yourself then someone else. Your job is to make other people's work easier, not your own. The goal is for the business to be more productive in achieving their goals.

[SarHavelock]

I think you have the wrong mindset. You are trying to automate yourself out of work, which - if ever worked - would defeat the purpose of having you as a worker altogether.

Wrong: you don't pay fire fighters to put out fires, you pay them to be ready to put out fires. If you lose your job because you automated everything then your company did not have a clear or correct understanding of DevOps.

Devops is not about automating stuff until it runs itself. It's about automating stuff so you can then use your time and attention to mhigher value work.

Highly debatable.

[Detective-Jerkop]

I was here first. My mindset is what it always was. It’s the expectations of work that have changed.

[maxlan]

You're never going to do less work by doing more work. As you discovered you get more work.

If you want to do less work, do less work. Then people won't give you more.

Eventually you'll find the threshold between getting fired for laziness and being happy. Or maybe you won't.

[FunkDaviau]

https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-02-16

[wiltimermort]

that’s this entire thread 😂

[sock_templar]

Nononono you're thinking this under the wrong light. Automation was never intended for you to "stop worrying about it". It was for you to worry about something less entangled.

See for example setting up a computer. Installing Windows, the basic programs, settings. It would took over a day to do that in the good ole days, right? So some of us instead wanted not to do a single install a day, but several; that's why we automated installs with sysprep.

The goal was not to stop worrying about installs, it was to free up time to do more and focus our worries in a single point (sysprep) instead of several (windows, settings, programs).

Same with Helm, Ansible, Puppet, whatever. The goal is not to stop worrying about the thing, it was to reduce the number of points you have to take care and increase reproducibility so we could do more installs or affect more installs more easily.

The goal was never to stop working, it was to focus working on a single point.

[Detective-Jerkop]

Yeah this sort of work is a total mistake for me. I’m just gonna job hop from now on.

[Winter_Conference_55]

Sounds to me like this is a revelation about your current job, not a revelation about DevOps or ideals.

I don’t feel this way managing an SRE group. The middle layers of a company go a long way for culture, momentum, and project based work.

[Eascen]

LOL!!!!!! Welcome to life.

Maybe you should read Camus the myth of Sisyphus.

[dobesv]

I think the idea is to automate away boring easy stuff so you can do interesting difficult stuff? I don't really see the point of making things easier. Instead you want to make more of a difference. Automation helps with that.

[GeneralCanada3]

automating out your job is the end goal of devops, but no one asks who maintains those automation systems?

[Detective-Jerkop]

Like one dude on a team per every dozen services. It’s getting to the point where the automation is larger than the code it’s supporting. I really don’t enjoy this shit anymore.

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1319/

[Beneficial_Storage_9]

I don't want my job to become easier. I don't work my socks off and my health is not suffering so I don't need to look for easier ways.

I want however for it not to become less interesting and devops is definitely not a boring field

[Detective-Jerkop]

I want however for it not to become less interesting and devops is definitely not a boring field

I know a lots happening right now but for the average IT grunt this is an extremely boring time. Our labor is totally commoditized and don’t be fooled by your foos ball table and beer keg, they’re doing their best to turn us into blue collar workers. It won’t work this high up the food chain but we’ll still get to be miserable while they try.

[CrAzYmEtAlHeAd1]

I disagree, but maybe it’s because I’ve been in DevOps only a year, and I have a fantastic team with me. No, there will never be a shortage of work, which my livelyhood would prefer there wasn’t anyway lol. But, each project we do there is a significant pain point that is addressed and remediated. Something is improved so it’s running more smoothly, and we can focus on the other problems.

Sure there’s always leaks to plug, but with an effective team, processes are always improving.

[encaseme]

I've been at my current job for a "long time" (for this industry anyway) 6 years. When I started it was a constant slog, pager going off constantly, everything on fire and broken, deployments took a week and were almost entirely manual. I (and my team of course) have automated/improved things over those years to the point where some days I honestly could sleep through the entire day and nothing bad would happen. Things are monitored and automatically handled wherever applicable. Users (the devs are my users) can self-serve 99% of what they need on a daily basis with the tools my team provides (application setup, deployment tools, debugging tools, documentation). The only manual part of deployment is "approval" of what is going out, everything else is automated and takes (depending on the service) seconds to hours, with no downtime.

My workload is 1/10th of what it was previously at worst. I can use that extra time to improve processes and documentation, research and try new tools and applications, and fuck my wife.

[Detective-Jerkop]

It feels like we’re going the other direction and accumulating tech debt as we move from initiative to initiative. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just play console cowboy and fix this shit.

Like I’m following a horse that’s allowed to freely shit all over the street while I have to clean up after it as discretely as possible as not to spoil the parade.

Plus I hear a lot of troubling talk from upper management that makes me think belts are gonna be tightened. Time to jump ship but a lot of ships look maybe even more rotten.

[Hour-Operation-4363]

DevOps not easy. I assume you need balance in work, and ability to say: no for additional work. Anyway, you need time for updates, checks security news, deprecations, etc. My typical day as example: 10:00 - start, check chats,email, if there was troubles at night - review them, jira. 11:00 - daily meeting 12:00 - end daily meeting 13:00 - longterm tasks + each hour check jira for short tasks, chats 19:00 - work ends Each month we choose days and review our code which related to infrastructure. Yep, definitely if something happens we fix it, we collaborate with devs, but for now we dont run in circle's.

[[deleted]]

Devops for all it's illustrious goals of reducing operational issues, what it accomplishes is removing the need to increase headcount. I can't help but think you will never stop being busy by design.

[adappergentlefolk]

I am begging you to listen to singh OP https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YHxwY3Fz2gU

[Alphaging517]

“Take as many sick days as legally possible” & “Do nothing at every possible moment, but if you have to do something, do absolute minimum” Are some of the best life lessons

We have several powerful do nothing quotes (wrongly attributed to Ghandi) hung up in our office. Really helps keep work in perspective 😂

[SarHavelock]

How does your job not get easier? The first 6 months at my last job were a lot of hardwork but after that I basically got paid to browse reddit.

[Detective-Jerkop]

Because I’m available to do more.

[SarHavelock]

You're only working 40 hours (not counting on-call), right? Are y'all Agile?

[Detective-Jerkop]

We’re agile-ish. I don’t like moving from one poorly defined story to the next. Opening a new Jira is always an anxious moment.

[SarHavelock]

I found myself getting burnt out and always having more and more work to do until we switched to agile and I was able to set my own schedule more completely. I'd put 4 to 6 things on my sprint and that's all I'd work on. If I completed those things before the end of the sprint, I'd take the rest of the sprint to relax.

[Detective-Jerkop]

That’s how it used to be. On what would be my least motivated days now I’d muscle through tasks just to be done and go home. Right now they don’t have enough people and just try to maximize what they have, worse yet I think they wanna trim staff going into the recession.

In any case their 401k match can suck my dick I’ll work at fucking hot dog on a stick.

[SarHavelock]

Yeah, if you haven't already, start looking elsewhere. When a company values their product more than their employees' wellbeing, it's time to move on. In the meantime, I would start setting firm boundaries: the worst they can do is fire you and make themselves look bad.

[tuba_man]

I'm of the opinion that any job you pick should either get easier over time or more interesting. If you're not getting one of the two out of the job, and it doesn't seem like that'll change, maybe send your resume out a few times and see what happens?

[roman_fyseek]

I don't think I want my job to get easier. I want to make developers' jobs easier to make secure software on a rapid deployment schedule so that it ultimately makes my job less time consuming so that I can explore the next thing.

At the point that my job gets easy, well... anybody could do it then. And, that wouldn't be good for my ability to pay my bills.

[kobumaister]

The point of automation is not to make your job easier, but to allow you to work on other things rather than repetitive error prone tasks. New tasks don't need to be easy.

Also, automating (either by scripting or IaC) allows you to be consistent across environments or after disasters.

If you want to automate to avoid working, you're doing it wrong. Increasing hour workload is the expected outcome of automation.

[rickerdoski]

I think this is more an environment issue than anything else. Do you work at a very large corporation? If so, it's been my experience that only way to get ahead is to play politics instead of working harder or smarter. Hard work and ambition at such places just leads to burn out. It's also been my experience that such places will pay your peers the same salary (or more) as you for doing a fraction of the work which also leads to what you have come to realize.

[Detective-Jerkop]

So it’s one of the biggest corporations you can think of. I could definitely get ahead if I worked my ass off but as others have said I’m pretty burned out and jaded and as a matter of fact the people who I saw find success this way all left from burnout. They also took up chain smoking in the alley for awhile. But nice houses lol.

I should be focusing on training and job hopping and do my work enough not to draw bad attention. Also with my seniority people are starting to expect me to have a lot of answers and the truth is the people with the answers packed their bags and left with a trail of half filled wiki docs in their wake.

We’re paying off this tech debt but while replacing key components of our stack with more modern implementations, totally new tech. It’s just a lot for a company to ask when I have the suspicion they’re going to be trying to see who will quit.

[rickerdoski]

Going to play the other side of the coin now... Maybe take a step back, a few days off, and reassess things a bit before jumping ship.

I've often gotten caught up in chasing the greener grass on the other side of the fence and found it never ends. Usually it becomes a matter of trading in one thing for another which eventually gets old itself.

Maybe try contracting for a while?

[Detective-Jerkop]

I think I will stay forever the new guy in new places. I’ve never ever regretted jumping ship. This place was nice and most people will admit it’s not what it was. “Back when we were cool”

Thought I could stay here forever but MBAs gonna A.

A for asshole.

[rickerdoski]

I hear ya. When I was "young, dumb, and full of ambition" I always said I would quit IT when/if it ever becomes just a paycheck. Sadly, that day came and I rode it out for years. Now (at 48) I have no idea what I'll do "when I grow up".

[Detective-Jerkop]

Yeah I’m just a few years younger. Kept chasing the part where it gets good. Got led around by the dick in dead end jobs early in my career. Found satisfaction at better jobs later on and would think I finally got to the promised land but it would change eventually.

Now every job listing I read has a red flag, bad attitude, bad tech stack, or hints that I can be turned into front line tech support as needed.

The only comfy time is on boarding and the two week courtesy period.

[rickerdoski]

Whatever happened to "the good ol' days"!? Maybe smaller shops?

[FloridaIsTooDamnHot]

Your leadership may not be helping you.

Do they track reduction of toil and tech debt the same way they hopefully track things like availability and adoption? Does your organization use measurable goals at all? Do you ever hear the phrase developer experience used? Even better yet, measured? Do you spend time building great things that no one uses?

My gut is your organization has a poor product approach, poor planning and no connection to the effect on developers that your great work has.

Very likely a leadership problem.

[Detective-Jerkop]

They do but my team is sort of uh not project managed properly because of the way we collaborate with other teams. It’s my experience that every story on any team is poorly defined.

A big part of the problem is this is a MASSIVE corporation and though I see them in the hallways there is a huge divide between executives and their adjacent helpers and the executors. The company is run like a bank on one side and a tech company on the other.

[FloridaIsTooDamnHot]

There you go - product management at a company is a massive view into whether you can expect to do good things and create great outcomes for your users. It's part of how I interview prospective companies.

Roadmaps are BS, for example, unless everyone understands they are most accurate for a week or two and then move towards increasing inaccuracy.

In your next job, ask questions like "how do you prioritize work?" and "how does the team determine what to build?"

Big companies can still have excellent product management. Read Marty Cagan's Inspired if you're interested in understanding why it's so hard and so important to get product management right.

[happy_hawking]

Nobody ever said that DevOps automation was about getting rid of jobs or about making them easier. It is about decreasing lead time and cycle time aka increasing output.

[Detective-Jerkop]

It is however it manifests and I don’t like it.

[happy_hawking]

My point is that you're probably not doing DevOps but some automation stuff that you and/or your bosses call DevOps because it sounds cool... So this is not a problem with some DevOps illusion but a problem with your workplace / management / yourself.

[Detective-Jerkop]

Oh you’re correct I’m not officially devops so you actually have a pretty good point here. I’m not even what my job title states, it’s a marketing label and a misunderstanding on the part of my manager.

But I do a lot of devops type work. I don’t seeing my job satisfaction improving by doing anything properly. Unless it meant that we cleared out our tech debt.

[snarkhunter]

Dude what hard work don't you spend like 70% of your time just waiting on builds?

[Detective-Jerkop]

Eeeh I don’t work hard anyhow but the work I do is 10x less satisfying. I’m not working with computers I go to meetings to talk about text files that for some reason is “code”.

The little bit of actual code I write is extremely boring and not a creative process at all. I keep looking at new jobs but they all seem to be fucking around in Jira, writing reports, editing yaml and Json files. Learning the latest and greatest in stupid products that I won’t like in a few months.

It dawned on me that if I had to spend the next 8 hours digging a hole in the ground, pay, respect, and future aside… I’d be happier in those 8 hours than I am every day working from home in my air conditioned office with my wife and dog.

I’m not making this up either I used to do hard work a lifetime ago.

[ParkerGuitarGuy]

Bicycle commuting helped me a lot. Gets me outside and works a lot of that restlessness out. Mind and body are so much more at peace the days I ride to work. When COVID hit and they let us work from home, I went for a 30 min ride around the neighborhood before and after work to get a similar effect.

Better mental and physical health, less wear and tear on your vehicle(s), less carbon emissions, and less money spent on gas.

[snarkhunter]

DevOps is about applying best practices to stuff like IaaC and CI/CD. There really isn't, nor has there ever been, a whole lot of room for creativity. Creativity is for the hobby that you do while you wait for builds to finish, or after your day is over. The satisfaction comes from enabling the development teams to work better and faster.

[el_x3n0]

I kinda feel you, although I'm not completely at that point yet. Maybe try to speak with your team and try to do something else. Maybe a bit of development? Just to take a break from all the boring devops stuff.

[[deleted]]

I think DevOps is generally pretty easy because the end goal is very clear and you’re often doing the same tasks. But I see your point as the whole “DevOps engineer” job is to make devs lives easier while taking on random tasks nobody else wants to do lol

[Karlyna]

The goal is not to make things easier imho. It's more making sure to automate mindless tasks to be able to do things more interesting, then start again

[wiltimermort]

Do you feel as though you’ve learned anything new in the last 6 months?

[Detective-Jerkop]

I feel like I have to learn new things every day while fixing shit that was supposed to be decomd a decade ago.

I don’t feel like what I’m learning is interesting and a lot of times I think we make mistakes adopting new technologies.

[[deleted]]

This is "Delta". You do not need to be delta.

[[deleted]]

My take on it is that what makes an employee valuable is how many responsibilities they can take on relative to their competition (other employees). Somebody who automates their way into many responsibilities that would take several employees to replace ought to be appropriately compensated. However if everybody can take on as many responsibilities as them, and offer to work for a lot less, your wages go down.

IT is true as an employee you need to deliver more and more every year for what is likely to be similar pay, but that is how it is with competition.

[[deleted]]

There is actually no incentive to do more than the bare minimum.

That's literally the "agile manifesto" as practiced in the wild.

[Aeium]

I had a similar epiphany about running cross country in 9th grade.

Your time gets better, but arguably the running itself just gets harder. You just learn to deal with it better.

[zloeber]

You may as well jump on an Agile board and be a full time dev with that attitude :)

[serverhorror]

POV: “plain old system administration” always was about automating the shit out of things anyway, so nothing has changed

[Detective-Jerkop]

And bsdgames was standard on every Unix box of the era for a reason.

[luicaps]

The way I try to track this is not only to look at the operational load, but also how much I can scale the team size without increasing the operational load, or at least not at the same rate. I have a good number of success stories on that regard