Ask HN: The Downsides of DevOps

They just want results. They see IT/development as a "black box" where the internals can be ignored. It's usually only when you get companies founded by techies, or a handful of visionary types who really see the fusion of tech & business, that you get away from that.

So my take? Sure, go into DevOps. Read the books, read the blogs, watch the videos, learn the "received wisdom." But try not to be overly disappointed when you're unable to implement things exactly according to that wisdom in practice. Do the best you can and accept that there are some things you can't control. Or, start your own company where you can control them.

I think there are a few questions you can ask, but in general there are only two that matter:

1- Does upper management support the team, or, does the company have good engineering culture?

2- Does the team lead have good knowledge, or, does the team gather requirements and other info before pushing out their "DevOps" projects?

BTW I have been thinking about engineering culture. Sometimes people think that a good culture just means a blank cheque, but I think it has to be good on both sides. Upper management should give some freedom but engineering team should also gather enough info and evaluates projects before execution. Sounds like common sense but ask yourself or your neighboring teams: Do you always gather enough info and validate your projects? Have you ever volunteerily turned down a proposal without fear?

If you work for a company with a poor Engineering culture where tech is not valued "DevOps" means "get the nerds in the basement to fix my laptop". No one will care about you until there's an outage. Then everyone will care about you for 72 hours where they promise to prioritise all the things that were neglected in the last 5 years. And then they will forget about you until the next incident and the cycle will repeat indefinitely.

If you work for a company where Engineering culture is strong and tech is front and centre you can have a more fulfilling career.