this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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I keep seeing a pattern of sre/devops/sysadmin tasks being given back to developers and canning the SREs. Hard to understand why. Then some of the SWE get stuck basically focussing on infra SRE stuff and become unwilling SRE more or less. Circle of life? Do the old devops folks get made into glue or something?
If i interpreted the "trend" correctly, "devops" was bastardized away from its original meaning to now mean "sysadmin", at least in most cases.
Yeah. A "DevOps" is just a "sysadmin" who can pretend they don't hate all developers for stretches of 20 minutes at a time. (I'm kidding. I know our SysAdmins love us... In their own secret ways.)
Well, I imagine theres a continuum of experiences and definition differences across the industry. Similar to how "product manager" is different at each place. What I saw back in the early 2000s or so was that the SRE and the word "engineer" in general used to be handed out sparingly. An "SRE" was a sysad/devops who had the ability to commit code to fix a product instead of just opening a bug and waking an engineer. An "engineer" committed compiled code, not short scripts. But then eveyone and their cousin became "sre" whether they deserved it or not, and everyone got an "engineer" title. I've seen manual QA folks who were unironically called "engineers". QA is dead now and QE is barely hanging on, and SRE seems to be dying too. Not sure whats next, maybe just overpriced cloud gui tools and thats the end of it. And SRE can go be high school comp sci teachers. And SWE can wake up and fix their own bugs and hate their lives.
Devops is going the way of qa too.
I don't think I agree. The role of a sysadmin involved a lot of hand-holding and wrangling low-level details required to keep servers running. DevOps are something completely different. They handle specific infrastructure such as pipelines and deployment scripts, and are in the business of not getting in the way of developers.
"Devops" original intent meant you don't have a separate "operations" department separate from teams "developing" your product / software due to competing incentives. "Dev" wants to push new stuff out faster; "ops" wants to keep things stable. Or "dev" needs more resources; but "ops" blocks or doesn't scale the same. The idea was to combine both "dev" and "ops" people onto projects to balance these incentives.
Then managers and cloud clowns repurposed it to apply to every person in a project so now every member is expected to perform both roles (badly). Or even more overloaded to somehow refer to "developer infrastructure" teams.