DevOps or how we are losing wages and the future of the IT industry, part two

The last article has already caused a lot of indignation, I think this article will not be liked by many any more, in it I will describe how customers see a DevOps engineer.



The more time goes by, the more I hear that “this is the duty of“ devups ”, requests to the database want to tune devups, guess how and with what dependencies the software is going to the coder - devups, evpn + bgp + ipsec + geo dns + network authorization using certificates - devups, fixing architecture errors and coming up with bloodless options - devups, turning a regular pg_dump into synchronous replication - devups, being a psychoanalyst for service stations / CEO and team - devups.



Another interesting trend is k8s + load balancer for any sneeze. Not so long ago I was even offered to put the load balancer on the database, maybe the load average will go down and the disks will be less loaded…. K8s is generally a separate topic, you can write 2-3 articles about the myths associated with it.



Increasingly, you can hear from business that developers and engineers are getting drunk, that Sberbank has set up a soap bubble, and a miracle is about to happen, and we will start working like ordinary people for 60-80k from the senior. In the regions, of course, this already exists, but everything was sad there, but here they already dream for all cities except Moscow.



It's even more fun from the same business to listen to how lazy they are, stories about how useless employees are, and that you need to look for ways not to plan work, architecture, think about the future, but to spank low-quality code at the speed of light, because then devups “horizontally scales ", Yes, we have 1 query in the database costs 15% of the capacity of the hardware, and 5 queries - a collapse, so what? Horizontal scaling without resource allocation will save us !!! - the truth is not specified how. Especially if the database is quite crooked in architecture, for example, the default PostgreSQL or Elasticsearch.



Use technology as intended? No, it's boring. Planning the architecture, data schemas and their processing - why is it expensive and slow. But what to do? There is a solution - hire a devups and blame him for all the mortal sins of your project, not forgetting to add - everything worked exactly before you came. And the logs lie, everything worked !!!



Increasingly, I see quite interesting and promising projects dying, even at the stage of inception, simply because of political games. I communicate with RM, who has been hindered for six months already from selling a product that can bring the company billions of rubles a year, but they constantly put a spoke in his wheels. Everyone is looking for ways to do development without spending on it, and the DevOps methodology is increasingly perceived as a way to dump a non-working product into production, and cover up the jambs with containers, balancers and stubs, even if this leads to low ratings and a large number of negativity, the main thing is saving on development.

As the survey in the previous article showed, for the majority of habr visitors, employers try to plug several holes with 1 person. Naturally, without compensating for these obligations. But, the problem is that the business itself suffers as a result. Due to low wages and high labor productivity in relation to financial and technical support, the business survives, if, with such a management as in the CIS, they tried to do business in Japan or the USA, it would have gone bankrupt long ago.



Many methodologies that came to us from developed countries were completely distorted. For example, Agile, Scrum, DevOps - all 3 methodologies require a significant change in business processes for work, but the management in the CIS is not ready for this, he hopes to combine old habits and modern methodologies, we are at the top in the old way, and you are in a modern and effective way down below. It is pointless to implement all 3 methodologies from below, the presence of cards, daily reports, plans for 2 weeks and releases for each line of code does not mean that you have implemented these methodologies, it means that you have introduced additional reporting processes that simply help find the culprit and excuse for senior management. It is only more difficult for the project and the people who start working in such conditions to implement their plans, because the number of reports is growing significantly more,than if they weren't.

Now there are quite a few articles and speeches by strange IT managers who already offer to pay for results, almost as before for lines of code, removing time from work to think about implementation, considering that it is 30-40 minutes, and then purely writing code. At the same time, give us 2-3 weeks to think about and calculate the costs and risks for management decisions ... As a result, we are increasingly faced with the fact that the quality of products inevitably decreases, of course, this is not only a problem of the IT industry, but in our industry it is especially acute, because the failures are then blamed on programmers who, like “squandered 180 million rubles,” I I have already seen 4 projects that, as a result of this process, do not fulfill their tasks, but have spent 1 billion rubles or more,but as a result, lazy IT specialists became guilty and its more reporting and regulatory procedures begin to correct the situation. To ensure supervisory functions, additional managers are hired, and the payroll for IT specialists is reduced. The number of decisions that we make ourselves is decreasing, and responsibility and accountability are growing, which leads to even greater problems.



You need to clearly draw lines of responsibility, and minimize them, otherwise, you simply become a victim in any political game.



In the next article I will write more about why DevOps and Agile, implemented from the bottom, will never be useful.