Comment on Help identifying job title
ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year agoThe problem is that DevOps is not really a title or a role, its a mindset. It can be summarized as “You build it, you run it” and is supposed to solve the age old problem that arises from the disconnect of developers and sysadmins, where developers just hand over code to the admins without ever having given much thought about how to run it reliably (aka. “You go figure that out, not my problem.”) and the admins being super protective of their painstakingly curated servers and databases that of course you as a developer obviously cannot have any access to whatsoever and of course your app has to work with the 10year old java version that ships with RHEL. The consequence was basically a lot of grief on all sides and huge waste of productivity.
The idea of DevOps is that these two responsibilities merge into on. That means that the team responsible for building the software also needs to take care of how to test it, how to build it, how to deploy it, how to monitor it, how to scale it, how to debug it, etc. This is now mainly incorporated into the software developer / “full stack” role.
The confusing part is, when you look at job postings, the DevOps engineer is often described as “working closely with” or “supporting / assisting” the development team. This goes pretty much against the principle of having the development team having responsibility for their own work. Instead, it’s often just a re-branding of the old role with the title du jour. It also often details the pecking order, namely devops being support for developers.
Given that, if a company offers a DevOps position, you should spend some time finding out what that actually means for you, your work and your career. More often than not, it may put you in a box that only comes with restrictions for not obvious benefit.
MrLuemasG@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh I see.
So, in theory, dev ops could apply to what I’m doing (just by way of being the only person responsible for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, debugging) - but, in reality, that isn’t often the case and it would be best to avoid putting myself in that box? Am I understanding that right?
ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Yes, that pretty much my point :)
MrLuemasG@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thank you!
I will see about sticking with the Software Engineer line of titles (I’m discussing whether or not calling myself a ‘Senior’ would be a good choice with some other commenters). It makes more sense and my supervisor had mentioned that she wants the best title that could represent my skills, responsibilities, and desired future jobs on a resume.
ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Well, I do have an opinion on that as well.
Senior is a nontransferable honorific, as in: it does not translate between organizations. I have had people who were senior in their old organization demoted to junior (aka. they mostly quit) because they could not write a line of code without internet or IDE to save their life, and I have had people come in as junior even though their started programming when they were 12 and could programm circles around most seniors, buy HR decided they had “no experience” after collage (which, in my opinion, boils down to exploitation of cheap labor). I also met a guy who was an good developer but at his company it was a formal requirement to give a talk to advance to senior. Even though he had 15 years of experience at that company non the less, he could never advance because he was afraid of public speaking.
So seniority is at least as much politics as it is skill or responsibility. In my experience, it boils down to whether or not you feel you deserve it. If the answer is yes, then you should see that you get it and that you are treated (paid) accordingly.