- DevOps in a job title is a bad thing. That it damages your career. If you hire DevOps engineers then you are doing it wrong.
- DevOps teams are a bad thing. That they are an anti-pattern. That they don’t exist?
- DevOps is a culture. It’s about empathy and values and if you buy tools or hire DevOps Engineers you are missing the point.
I say NO to all three. DevOps is a concrete activity – it has a name, it has a set of activities, a set of goals, a set of real world changes that we can begin making today. It needs DevOps engineers and DevOps teams, process change, organisational change, coaching, training and yes, the adoption of new tools to make it happen in reality. Describing it as a culture means it is destined to stay in the conference room and never result in real change.
Why do we insist on keeping DevOps so nebulous, in some kind of ivory tower?
It is a concrete activity.
It is a deep enough area of specialism to work in it full time and build a career.
It is a big enough source of competitive advantage that it sometimes needs a team of people to work on it.
You can’t buy it, but you can bring people in and make concrete change to work towards it.
The path to production, reduced release cycles, infrastructure as code etc are so important that hoping they emerge through a mythical culture is risky at best.
To end users: If you don’t have a DevOps capability I think you are missing out. Whilst the DevOps community are telling you you are doing it wrong by making it a reality, your competitors are putting DevOps initiatives in place and winning in the market by deploying better software more often.
To the DevOps community: Imagine if the early agile evangelists had said Agile Coaches and SCRUM maters are an anti pattern, that SCRUM is nonsense, that agile was fundamentally a culture and not a process. SCRUM wouldn’t have found widespread adoption. We would still writing functional specifications and working off of Gant charts. Despite the problems of Agile, we all have an interest in taking DevOps to Agile like levels of adoption. Please bring it down to earth.