{"id":10417,"date":"2018-01-15T23:50:35","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T05:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daedtech.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=10417"},"modified":"2018-01-16T20:45:52","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T02:45:52","slug":"think-full-stack-development-devops-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daedtech.com\/think-full-stack-development-devops-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"What Do I think of “Full Stack” Development and the DevOps Movement?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once again, I’m doing reader question Monday<\/a> on a Tuesday.\u00a0 I have no good excuses this time, either.\u00a0 We arrived last week in San Diego, which is beautiful.\u00a0 So, I’ll just flat out admit that I spent the weekend strolling beaches, eating lobster tacos, drinking craft beers, looking up at the stars and just generally enjoying life in a way that involved no writing of blog posts.\u00a0 I regret nothing.<\/p>\n

So let’s to reader question Monday on a Tuesday.\u00a0 This is actually a question that just came in today as I was gearing up to write about TDD and remote teams.\u00a0 It caught my attention, so I’ll give about the fastest turnaround time I’ve ever done on a question.<\/p>\n

I recently stumbled upon this article:\u00a0https:\/\/jeffknupp.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/15\/how-devops-is-killing-the-developer\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Which seems to lump Full-Stack dev in with DevOps, and discards DevOps, on the premise that the full-stack dev is good-for-the-org-bad-for-the-dev. I know you’ve weighed in against the full-stack dev with preference for specialization. I wonder if you believe this also means DevOps is DOE, or if there’s still room for DevOps in your mind (or perhaps more broadly speaking, for startup-like, feature-teams so often found in Agile\/Scrum orgs)?<\/p>\n

If you don’t like DevOps, what do you recommend instead to manage the entire release automation process, and everything else it entails?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alright.\u00a0 There’s a lot for me to work through here, so let’s break things up a little.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DevOps (And Full Stack) is Killing “The Developer?”<\/h3>\n

First, let me recap briefly the article’s thesis.\u00a0 And I’m really going to try to be gentle here and non-objectionable.\u00a0 I trade in blog posts for a living these days, and slugging it out with random people on the internet has worn as thin as it can possibly wear to me.\u00a0 I’d really rather not argue with this Jeff Knupp, and I can certainly empathize with waging a vigorous campaign to make your own job more fun.<\/p>\n

The article’s thesis is, essentially, this, from the perspective of a salaried employee in the enterprise.<\/p>\n

I hate the DevOps (and full stack) movements because I like writing code and they result in me writing less code.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author might object to this thesis, but that’s really the message.\u00a0 It asserts the superiority of the software developer as compared to other individual contributor roles, and then argues that DevOps and full stack (and forced skill diversification in general) are good for the employer, but bad for the employee.\u00a0 (Although he then curiously argues that it’s also bad for the employer, since they’re “overpaying” for non-development labor.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In short, I could paraphrase the line of argumentation fairly easily.\u00a0 Software developers are more important (and smarter) than anyone in other roles, which makes their time and labor more valuable.\u00a0 And because their time and labor are more valuable, they should specialize in software development, rather than wasting their talent on operations, QA, DBA, or any other breeds of lesser tasks.<\/p>\n

This is a Different Definition of Specializing than Mine<\/h3>\n

Again, out of my lack of interest in arguing with Jeff, should he ever wander by, I won’t bother weighing in specifically on what I think of this line of reasoning.\u00a0 But let’s establish that the type of specialization he’s referring to (writing code) is much different than the sort of specialization I refer to.<\/p>\n

If you refer to this post<\/a>, you’ll see that “specializing” in software development is closer to what I’d refer to as a competitive advantage.\u00a0 A specialty has to do with your value proposition, and that article offers no take on the value proposition of commodity app dev (it just assumes it in spades).<\/p>\n

Let’s draw a crystal clear distinction.<\/p>\n