DevOps; another ‘new’ thing that ain’t

What is it with IT people? There is a tendency to take something that people have been doing for a long time, slap a label on it and call it ‘the next big thing’. ‘Agile’ is one that gets up my nose, ‘the cloud’ is another, and ‘DevOps’ is my current favourite. Don’t get me [...]

What is it with IT people? There is a tendency to take something that people have been doing for a long time, slap a label on it and call it ‘the next big thing’. ‘Agile’ is one that gets up my nose, ‘the cloud’ is another, and ‘DevOps’ is my current favourite.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some nuanced uses of these terms. Some of the nuanced use has merit, but hardly needs to be labelled with some nebulous noun. The problems are not the ideas themselves, but as soon as a label is applied it starts to be twisted and morphed into something that is essentially useless.

How useless? Take ‘Agile’. The idea itself is simple and clearly expressed in the Agile Manifesto (even this is making preposterous claims about ‘uncovering better ways of developing software’—listen buddy, what you describe is the way many of the organisations I worked for developed software long before this manifesto was published, even while claiming to do the opposite). It’s not new, heck it wasn’t new even when the term was created. But having coined the term it started to accrete all manner of meaning (especially once the marketing twonks got hold of it).  The problem now is that if you ask ten people what ‘Agile’ is you’ll get ten different answers. Not only that, all ten will think the other nine are idiots, or heretics, who don’t understand the true meaning of Agile.

It would be easy to blame the marketers and they must bear a lot of the blame because no sooner does a new technology or method of working gain traction than they start riding the bandwagon labelling every product with the new non du jour. This process immediately destroys the original, possibly clearly defined, term.

However, easy as it is to blame the marketers (and I do), those in the IT world are complicit in this devaluing process.  The number of disagreements I’ve witnessed over just these three terms is staggering, not only because they are so fruitless but because they have a real impact on businesses. Weak managers incapable of independent thought, or fearful of making unpopular decisions, simply go along with the current popular idea and this leads to IT infrastructure and organisations that are a tangled mess of technology as the organisation is swept from one technology to the next on no better rationale than its popularity (this is the old ‘no one ever got fired for buying Compaq’ mentality that persisted in the ’90s).

So, DevOps. Another day another bloody stupid term. A devop is someone who bestrides the development and operational worlds. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked with an endless stream of such people over my twenty odd years in the business. I’ve even fulfilled that role on many occasions during those twenty years. This is not a new role, nor is it a new function, approach, method or technology. It’s just a new label and it will suffer the same fate as so many before it. It will be used and abused to the point of becoming worthless, nothing more than marketing fluff and a shorthand to make HR’s life easier (no need to actually think about what you really want, just search for DevOps on a CV, that’ll do). And that’s what pisses me off.

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