Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407388

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

I don't do this because I don't trust them but because I have different requirements. What matters most to them is completing their work items according to specifications. What matters more to me is long-term maintainability of our projects for the rest of the team.

Some of them have the long-term needs in mind. Some of them just don't think that way. I try not to make them feel like their work can't be trusted or like my demands are arbitrary. I think they are more receptive to my demands when I can at least provide context for them. That seems absolutely necessary to me.

I ask myself all the time whether I'm insisting on too much control. I appreciate you asking of yourself, "Is this my ego?" It can definitely go both ways.

If you put that responsibility on the developer--meaning you expect the dev to diagnose an issue that they introduced in the first place--what kind of result do you think you're going to get?

Layering these demands takes away from the overall quality of the application in my experience. You want an app developer to learn all about Prometheus so the app can have an endpoint with all these custom metrics, okay, and you want structured logging and expect the dev to learn how to use Kibana effectively? All that's a huge cognitive burden that eats a slice of the same pie (their brains) as domain knowledge, language & runtime knowledge, etc.

Get maybe one app developer to specialize, get maybe one app developer to cross-train with ops or monitoring even. But leave most of us out of it.

When you flip that expectation of developer involvement in operations, it exposes how unreasonable that arrangement is. Hey, DBA, the app is sucking up resources. Why don't you crack open an IDE and write a patch for it? What do you mean you don't know Go, what do you mean you don't use Git? Every DBA should know how to attach a debugger to a remote process, shouldn't they?

It's just exploitative. Or at least that's been my experience, so there's my bias.

The app should write records to a database? Fine. Here's where you configure the connection. The app in production is slow because the database server is weak? Not my problem, talk to your DBA.

The app should expose an HTTP endpoint for liveness probes? Fine. It's served from the path you specified. Your reused it for an external outage check, and that's reporting the service is down because the route timed out due to your ops team screwing up the reverse proxy? Literally not my problem, I could not care less.

I don't say this to scold you, but I think most of us should keep in mind that even simple code changes incur risk and add testing requirements.

   "   DropboxExt01" vs. "DropboxExt01"