transcript
show notes
Matty talks with Jeremy Duvall, founder of Seven Factor Software, a software engineering consultancy in Atlanta, about why DevOps keeps ending up as a department and what to do instead. Jeremy cut teeth at Danger, which built the T-Mobile Sidekick, then worked at Microsoft, and has been doing DevOps for a long time. The episode is part of the show's tenth-year look back, and Matty promises the anniversary episode in a month. The cold open is Jeremy on the Agile and DevOps values: "focus on your people and stop worrying about the stupid shit you use to get things done."
How DevOps Became a Department
Jeremy's first exposure was a DevOps Days in Atlanta where John Willis spoke on burnout, which showed that DevOps wasn't just about playing with Jenkins. Before that, Jeremy says, nobody thought you needed a department to deploy Jenkins servers: two people on a tools team built the machinery the rest of engineering used to ship. The real contribution of the movement was refocusing on the idea that developers are humans. Then, as with big data and digital transformation, big companies took the ideas, put them in a department with pay scales, and turned infrastructure teams into DevOps engineers doing the same things. Jeremy sees platform engineering as "the next logical evolution" of what DevOps should have been.
Matty adds that early DevOps deliberately avoided being prescriptive, with no manifesto, just the CAMS acronym of Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing from John Willis and Damon Edwards at the first US DevOpsDays in Mountain View, to which Jez Humble later added Lean, for CALMS. People still have to do work, and automation is where vendors make money, so DevOps drifted toward meaning Jenkins and Puppet. Jeremy compares it to Agile: a manifesto that gave rise to SAFe, which Jeremy calls garbage, and also to good things like Kanban and Lean. Matty adds that "SAFe is how to have Agile but let project managers still have a job."
Measurement and Incentives
Jeremy says the business community got its claws into both movements with Scrum, velocity metrics and somebody-has-to-get-fired accountability, which produces walled gardens, bureaucracy and a pathological culture instead of a generative one. Matty says measurement doesn't equal Taylorism, contrasts Nicole Forsgren's work on developer productivity at GitHub with McKinsey's, and names Freakonomics as the most important DevOps book: "Go learn about incentives and then you will understand DevOps."
Jeremy says what engineers do is hard to measure, so organizations reach for features shipped or hours against velocity points, and "A measurement ceases to be a good measurement when it becomes a target." Jeremy points to the developer productivity work of Abhinav and DX, which focuses on happiness, and cites Antifragile for thinking about teams that survive someone leaving or breaking an arm. Jeremy says Google, Amazon and Facebook get this right, with engineers empowered to deploy and build their own platforms, while Jeremy's retail clients are stuck in a 1990s CEO mindset, with Nordstrom as an example of a real turnaround. Matty adds that Courtney, who led that transformation at Nordstrom, has talked about internal platforms for the enterprise, linked below.
The Frozen Middle
Matty describes hearing at Chef that about 80 percent of CIOs said DevOps transformation was critical but only about 15 percent of enterprises had a plan, and says the C-suite can think big while middle managers whose job is executing one way of measuring will fight a radical change. At PagerDuty, banks had whole teams of incident managers, and they weren't bad people: "I would probably have done the same damn thing."
What Success Looks Like
Jeremy says most of the Fortune 500 now know DevOps is a thing, and successful teams have trust to make decisions and a paved golden road to production, with a platform or DevOps team, whatever it's called, building the frameworks while software engineering teams cross-skilled in things like Terraform get their apps to production without interference. The cloud means developers no longer wait two weeks for a Tomcat server. To avoid repeating the mistake, Jeremy says to avoid commoditization: "everything that's wrong with software engineering today is commoditization and value engineering." Jeremy builds teams with overlapping skills, "I don't want specialists in 2023," and says platform teams are software engineers, "They're not infrastructure people anymore." Matty wraps up with the 2014 episode How to Eff Up DevOps, linked below.
