We live in the era of extreme specialization.
Whoever decided that it’s ok? Beats me. I’m old enough to remember working with programmers that could take apart and put together any computer and wire up a data center. But that’s history now.
Maybe it’s ok to have a C# developer who doesn’t know what a SCSI cable looks like? Do you really need to know how to use a crimping tool in order to program in JAVA?
You’re #CuriousAboutData, so read on!
Specialization is artificial, after all. Whatever language a developer uses, their code is compiled for a specific hardware platform, and is executed within the constraints of an operating system and a network (as applicable). If they don’t know how to create an environment, they become dependent on someone else. Enter stage right conflicts with DevOps, politics and waste of time. Joy.
Further, what if something goes wrong? I know in most environments everything works exactly as expected and there are never configuration differences, but still.
What if?
Another dependency. Better get a lot of lollipops for your development team to pass their time while waiting for someone to come and rescue them. Of course, they will tell you that it works on their computer, so it’s completely inexplicable and unexpected that it wouldn’t work in the staging environment. Those SREs messing up again!
At Bitwise we promised ourselves that we’d never be in a blame game again, and we’ve kept that promise for at least 15 years running. We’re not against specialization. After all, we’re data specialists.
But we also believe in systems competence.
Everyone on our team can set up a test environment, deploy their code, collect and analyze logs, etc. With this we gain independence and achieve much higher development speed, efficiency, and precision.
We like people, so feel free to call or write. Humans only.
