I can understand such disdain. I am a software engineer currently working in a DevOps team (yes, team, you’ve heard it right). I’d say that 90% of DevOps engineers I’ve met don’t even know what a linked list is, and they themselves talk with disdain about developers.
I’m a developer who runs an infrastructure team. Have for years. And most developers I know don’t know why you’d log in JSON unless I was the one to explain it to them (patiently, while remembering the times they acted frustrated at my guys for not doing all the magic and just some).
On AWS, Boto. On Azure, DSC (Powershell) and ARM templates.
You will need to maintain separate TF codebases for each one anyway, but with the native solutions you get easy access to all features of the platform and don't have to spend most of your time jumping through stupid hoops to try and pretend that one tool can do everything.
No-one would write code worrying if it was valid in both Java and C# but that is the same level as what TF claims to do. It's complete shit, ditch it and you will be 10x happier, I guarantee it.
Sounds to me like using a single tool instead of a bunch of separate ones with different functionality is a win to me, but we are each entitled to our opinions.
Boto doesn’t seem comparable to terraform at all, unless you enjoy building state management yourself.
Terraform has been better than anything else I’ve tried so far.
No one is worthy of disdain due to unfamiliarity. I have explained why a software engineer that cares about the infrastructure might feel disdain after reading about and agreeing to the DevOps philosophy and switches to a DevOps role only to find out that the vast majority of new teammates lack comprehension of the most basic software engineering principles and don’t find value in them. It is incredibly frustrating.
Now, it is also true that most developers are just content with clicking around in their Jetbrains IDE without bothering about resources or even knowing what a file descriptor or system call is. Those so called senior Java engineers that I had to explain the basics of garbage collection to them. Those also make operations harder than it should be.
But that’s another story. We’re taking about the dissonance between what gets advertised as DevOps and what truly is, which seems to be the norm in our industry and is leaving a significantly amount of people unhappy and dissatisfied.
Nonsense. They're smart professionals, and probably the hardest workers in the company. Certainly the ones subject to the highest degree of pressure, which they always handle with grace.
I "speak" of the absurdity of our industry's superficial hype cycles, and forever-swinging pendulums. After you've been in the game for 20+ years, you will recognize a number of cycles and pendulums yourself. You'll go along with it, because that's part of being a professional. But you'll wonder why we're collectively unable to step back, and recognize more of these things, and not pointlessly churn so much.
However, I could write a similar comment about engineering managers and SDLC methodology trends. A similar comment about testers and quality assurance. And yes, probably a dozen similar comments about language fads and architecture patterns and trends related to developers.
I don't think any of those comments would come from a place of disdain for workers themselves. I just think that culture has shifted, and anything short of unqualified gushing praise registers as offense for many younger people. Maybe that pendulum will swing again too?
Have to agree with the comment below, DevOps folks/teams I've worked with seem to have both a superior attitude and an inferior knowledge of good practice and good habits when compared to developers.
Gee, I don’t know. When developers are constantly flinging half-tested and wholly unoperationalized things over the wall, perhaps it’s normal to develop local-maxima defensive practices.
I am a software developer and yet when I hear a developer open their mouth to complain about nearly any other aspect of a product team, be it QA or infra or UX, it has this weird tendency to resolve to Anybody But The Developer causing an issue.
Then perhaps you ought to sit with the folks I'm consulting for at the moment, who have a DevOps team who have failed to deliver a reproducible system for over two years and still have the attitude that they're the superior race.
That said, they are highly paid, London financial world folks, so you'd hope they'd be good.
I also hear from a developer I work with who has recently defected back from devops style roles to devs that this is not atypical. He seems to place blame at least partially on "The Phoenix Project" for the attitude!
