That is a patently false statement and total BS. It sure does crawl up your spine though doesn’t it? Why then do we need to do this?

I read an article, “How DevOps is Killing the Developer,” and, frankly, was a little put off by this:

Good developers are smart people. I know I’m going to get a ton of hate mail, but there is a hierarchy of usefulness of technology roles in an organization. Developer is at the top, followed by sysadmin and DBA. QA teams, “operations” people, release coordinators and the like are at the bottom of the totem pole. Why is it arranged like this?

Because each role can do the job of all roles below it if necessary.

Nice to know I’m almost as good as a developer. Now, I could go off on a “bash the developers” rant, but I think that would be seriously silly and counter-productive, not to mention completely against my beliefs. I really do like, admire, respect, developers. I also respect system administrators and SAN admins and QA people, hell, project managers. You can go find a web site or a blog specializing in any of these IT disciplines and locate the “DBAs are better than developers” article or the “QA people save the universe” article or “Thank the gods project managers keep all you poo flinging monkeys in line” article. They’re out there. And every single one of them is wrong.

My actual job title these days is Product Evangelist, but I’ve spend the last 15 years as a DBA, database developer and data architect. I feel like I have a handle on that job. I’ve specialized around the Microsoft stack, not because of any sort of religious beliefs, but because it pays the bills. Before that I worked as an application developer. Before that I was in tech support. And you know what, at no point in my career was any of the jobs I did literally more important than the others. You know why? They’re all in support of the same thing: the company succeeds.

Now, fine, developers are smart people. No question, no argument. Developers are capable of learning other jobs (I’m living proof). But you know what, so are people in all those other positions. How do I know this? Because I’ve worked with the QA person turned developer. She was a GREAT QA person. She was so great because she learned the full stack. She developed an understanding of databases and systems and code in support of doing a better and better job at QA. Then, she finally decided she wanted to fix the code a little earlier and switched over to development full time. I’ve also met the QA person turned sysadmin. I’ve met the developer turned SAN admin. The system admin turned DBA, the DBA turned developer, a million and one support desk people turned developer/dba/admin. Every one of these people followed similar trajectories. They started learning the full stack and found areas where they could specialize while using their knowledge of the full stack to make each position they were in better.

But all these jobs and all these people are all, or all should be, focused on one thing, helping the business to do what the business does, for most businesses, support the customer.  Regardless, the focus needs to be on the goals of the organization, not on the purity of a job, a process, a software stack, or a system. Purity and perfection are dangerous concepts within IT. We need to keep our focus where it belongs, not on MY code or on MY database or on MY servers, but on OUR BUSINESS.

And DevOps (I wish the term didn’t have such bad connotations), is about breaking down communication barriers, not just putting all the work on one person/team. Again, focus back on the business and what the business does.

So no, I am absolutely not better than you (the title is just click-bait). I’m not. But, you’re not better than me either. If my saying that makes you angry, maybe you need to reexamine your assumptions.

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