Similarly to how the transition from sysadmin to DevOps was a once in a lifetime opportunity to professionalize a trade and get them appropriate salaries and status, I think there is a bifurcation happening among savvy consumers of operational labor right now.
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There is a refinement happening between things that were traditionally Customer Support and things that either don’t have a name or have too many names, which for lack of a better word I’ll call Operations.
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Management paradigm moving from “Highly paid specialists architect a system to move huge numbers of tickets; each ticket moved by a cheap IC managed by a microscopically-less-cheap manager” to “The individual unit of labor is a spreadsheet line but the IC is doing the thought.”
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This is partly because startups are discovering needs no one has ever had (“How would you photograph 100k properties across Japan? Ideally with a team of 3?”), partly because operators are getting to leverage better tools, and partially because of the huge economic returns.
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All of the B2C and fintech startups have substantial amounts invested in technology as technologists understand it but the really impressive economic moat is the ops work.
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Replying to @patio11
What do you think of the complaints from some founders that DevOps professionalism is too costly, or the resistance to paying market rate because they hope it will become automated soon?
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Replying to @danielstoddart
I think what I usually think about complaining about market rates: if DevOps labor is overpriced then you should sell it rather than buying it. Given few founders or VCs are teaching themselves Ansible, well, there’s your answer.
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Replying to @patio11 @danielstoddart
As to whether every individual allocation of labor is a correct allocation, no, and in DevOps particularly (not uniquely among engineering disciplines) I think many tech choices are made for the agent rather than the principle.
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As to whether automation will happen, trivially yes, automation is why you can deploy 100k+ server fleets without requiring a stadium full of sysadmins. As to whether automation gets you below “20% of my engineers work on DevOps”, I am not optimistic at scale.
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Replying to @patio11 @danielstoddart
sysadmin was 90% managing automation from the start, any new automation you add will still need to be managed by a sysadmin
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