Ask HN: How do you handle being assigned Ops tasks knowing you joined to do Dev?
Title is pretty much it. I joined Oracle a few months ago after applying to a dev position. As soon I joined, I was assigned Operations work which to be honest is not what I was hoping for. I was wondering if anyone else in the HN community experienced something like this before? Is this common in bigger companies where it's more "Closing Jira Tickets" than actual coding work? Is this gonna paint me as an Ops person from now on?
I started seriously thinking about quitting and looking elsewhere.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
24 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 64.6 ms ] threadI don't know what it is about the software industry, that simultaneously not many people can code well yet companies seem to not want programmers to just program. I feel every manager I have come across has somehow expressed a view that I needed to do much more than just code... at one place they even said it was "the bare minimum" to contribute to the codebase, but when I ask if the manager should expand their own horizons and do some coding, of course that idea never gets attention of any kind.
It does feel like unionizing might be overdue for software engineers across the industry.
I would posit that in high functioning engineering organizations ever dev should get experience and in fact target a minumum of 1/3rd of their time be spent on operations work. Ignoring the way your application get's deployed, the environment it has to run in, the systems it needs to integrate with is a great way to build terrible software. Knowing all of that detail makes you a better developer and helps you develop better software. So I don't find it necessarily bad for your career if you end up doing some operations work as a developer. That said you do still want some level of actual development work present so if you don't have any of that then it's a sign of an unhealthy engineering organization.
Now to address the elephant in your comment. Since you mentioned you joined Oracle my advice is to get out as soon as you can. That company is toxic. It's a toxic presence in the database marketplace regardless of how good the database itself is. I've heard it's also a toxic place to work. No idea how much of the workplace stuff is true as opposed to just rumor but it's enough to convince me never to work there.
On the other hand, as an engineer, expecting to do no Ops work is usually naive, regardless of what you are promised.
As a former operations person, I learned more about the code I deployed than I ever wanted; it all could've been avoided if development also learned a little about the operations side.
It just makes us all better. Developers that actively show no interest in operating it tell me they don't want to support their work, honestly.
Don't you think they might have a little more insight, or, at the very least, have already heard the rumors? What information do you think you're giving them that they wouldn't already have?
The developers that are surprised at every turn of deployment (or really the lifetime of the code/service) got there by focusing purely on the code and none [or to be fair, very little] on the environment in which it operates.
This is how the "works on my machine" meme was started. We don't run the product or maintain SLAs on 'your machine', so it doesn't matter.
It gives us an idea for what it should look like under normal operations, but that's as far as it goes.
So many developers have told me crazy things like chmod 777, 'replace python2 with 3 for everything, not just me', and so on. The epitome of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
There is a reason why in other fields, people tend to specialize instead of generalize.
I think there is some misguided marketing/MBA ideas that developers can learn and do any and all technical work. I have seen in my current company quality of work and work satisfaction destroyed after higher-up decided that we don't need operations and developers should do DevOps now.
I’ve found working on oracle much more challenging than MySQL/SqlServer, which I imagine have much better enterprise orientation than say Postgres.
I think most places will have you do a bit of operations work.
If you're not doing some work to understand how your software works in real life, you're just a theoretician, and you're going to get punched in the (virtual) mouth when your naive assumptions fail to materialize in the random world of production.
Do the ops work, just like Ops/SRE cleans up the shit-stew you call your software when it breaks in prod. Or stop writing bugs. You pick.
You are absolutely damaging your growth potential as a developer.
Operations might give you some useful perspectives just like QA might give you some interesting insights but it won't be as helpful as actually writing code.
It sucks but we're in an industry that actively preys on the naivete of those with less experience.
Don't fall for it. Start looking now.
It happens all of the time. You applied for one role and interviewed you and hired you a different role. Your job title and responsibilities made within your offer should mention this change. Were you hired as a developer with title or ops?