As a DevOps specialist, automating

Note trans. : Worthy of attention was the most popular publication of Sabreddit / r / DevOps over the past month: "Automation officially replaced me at work - a trap for DevOps". Its author (from the USA) told his story, which brought to life a popular saying that automation will kill the need for those who support software systems.


Explanation on the Urban Dictionary to the already established (?!) Phrase about replacing a person with a script

So, here is the publication itself:
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In the environment of DevOps-departments you can often hear such a joke: “If we automate everything, we will remain without work”.

However, this is exactly what happened to me and about a hundred other DevOps engineers. I can not go into details because of the agreement on nondisclosure: I am sure that sooner or later the information will emerge, but I do not want to be the one who voiced it.

I will try to give a general idea of ​​how it all happened.

About five years ago, I worked as a manager in the DevOps department of a medium-sized technology company, receiving an excellent salary at that time (190 thousand USD), compensating our incredible amount of forced processing.

As usual, a LinkedIn recruiter contacted me. He represented the largest multinational conglomerate that did not interest me at all as a potential workplace. The recruiter wrote that the company is actively expanding its teams of software engineers, developers, and DevOps on the eve of several major projects, and noted that they would like to invite me for an interview.

I refused and said that I was not interested. He asked how much I earn, and stressed that the conglomerate will certainly offer much more. This spurred my curiosity - because I thought that I already had an excellent salary.

In short, I flew for an interview, got the position of Senior Lead with a salary of 275 thousand USD plus stock options and bonuses, as well as the opportunity to work remotely (ie, I did not have to move), although the very idea of ​​working for a huge corporation I did not like. However, the offer was too good to reject (they promised me a lot more than Amazon earlier that year).

The company had a DevOps department, but it consisted mainly of senior system administrators who could write quite a lot in Python / Bash / PowerShell to make it dangerous. Therefore, they needed a team of real DevOps engineers with programming experience in lower level languages ​​to work on complex projects.

Over the next three years, our department expanded. I must say that the management did everything right. We were almost never denied what we asked for, with more than 90% of the planned projects we completed on time and met the budget, which is truly amazing.

However, about one and a half years ago, it became obvious that we literally automated everything *. Of course, regular maintenance and inspections were still carried out, but for the last year and a half I actually only worked 1-2 hours a day, since there was practically nothing to do. I was not going to give up such a high-paying job, but I was afraid that day X would finally come, and he came yesterday.

In fact, it was announced that most of the DevOps teams were dismissed (75 people left who are working on specific applications), since the IT and Software Engineering teams were able to cope with all the code, and for the guys from DevOps there is simply no more work.

I was offered a position in the IT team, but the salary there was almost half as much. I could continue to work remotely, but they wanted me to eventually move to the city where the office is located, and could appear in it more often.

It is a pity that it happened because I liked working there. The company took good care of us (not counting the dismissal, of course), and there are not too many places for DevOps with a salary higher than 200 thousand USD and a standard 8-hour working day, almost without processing.

Fortunately, I wisely used my money and managed to fully repay 4 mortgages in the last 5 years. Now I have a small additional income, expenses are limited, so I can afford to slowly search for a new place.

Additions (from translator)

The author himself comments on his headline like this: “I apologize if clickbait turned out: I was just trying to add a little humor to the heading, not intending to turn my story into clickbait or DevOps horror.”

And not all commentators agreed with the aforementioned “trap”, “pitfall” in the context of DevOps: “Why is it a trap? You got a good salary (even more than described as “excellent” before), got rid of extra hours of work, did an excellent job and got a great record for a resume. ”

A couple of additions from the author’s other comments about this story:

• About salary. Important factors are regional and professional. The author, being a software engineer with 25 years of experience, has held the position of a DevOps team manager. At the same time, his experience is not limited to knowledge of modern infrastructure, but extends to such programming languages ​​as C ++, Fortran and Cobol, which was critical for interaction with developers in the organization.
• For those who also thought that 75 DevOps engineers is a lot. This company " employs more than 50 thousand people and literally thousands of applications are functioning."

Bonus

If you haven’t read the recent interview of our technical director, Dmitry Stolyarov ( distol ), for the DevOpsConf conference and the DevOps podcast Deflop , then it raised a similar question. And what a look was voiced:

- And what then [in the case of a strong simplification of the use of K8s] will be with engineers, system administrators who support Kubernetes?

Dmitry: And what happened to the accountant after the appearance of 1C? About the same. Before that, they counted on a piece of paper - now in the program. Labor productivity increased by orders of magnitude, and the work itself did not disappear. If earlier 10 engineers were needed for screwing in a light bulb, now one will be enough.

The number of software and the number of tasks, it seems to me, is now growing at a speed greater than the emergence of new DevOps and increasing efficiency. Now the market has a specific shortage and it will last a long time. Later, everything will go into a certain norm, at which the efficiency of work will increase, there will be more and more serverless, a neuron will be bolted to Kubernetes, which will pick up all the resources right as it should ... and generally do everything yourself as it should - man, stand back and do not bother.

But decisions will still need to be made by someone. It is clear that the level of qualification and specialization of this person is higher. Now in the accounting department you don’t need 10 employees who keep account books so that they don’t get tired. This is just not necessary. Many documents are automatically scanned, recognized by the electronic document management system. One smart chief accountant is enough, already with much bigger skills, with good understanding.

In general, this way in all industries. With cars in the same way: earlier a car mechanic and three drivers were attached to the car. Now driving a car is the simplest process in which we all participate every day. Nobody thinks that a car is something complicated.

DevOps or system engineering will not go anywhere - high level and work efficiency will increase.

PS

Read also in our blog:

• “ How many developers think Continuous Integration is not needed? ";
• " Junior, who on the first day of work deleted the database from production ."