alt Hacker NewsI work a "dev"ops job, and like yeah, I'm pretty sure this field is even more fucked than software engineering is.
IaC codebases, configs, utility scripts are relatively tiny, and fit into context windows whole. Models are eating them for breakfast.
They're really good at incident response. Sadly, much better than our dedicated colleagues from <location> ever will be. They'll chew through cloud service logs, application logs, application code, iac code and config, CI output, etc. to get whatever is needed, cause wide knowledge is no issue. Even disassembling stuff is no barrier, tracing things down from app level, to runtime level (e.g. JVM), to native calls.
They're really good at handling deployments, end to end infra setup and migrations, following checklists. Hell, they don't even really need checklists. Something that cannot be said about other dedicated colleagues from <location>, who cannot breathe without a checklist, will skip over steps, or otherwise very creatively misinterpret them or improvise something wicked.
They're really good at spinning up mad nice dashboards, and keeping business types happy with impressive looking write-ups they'll never read. It's really refreshing to not have to write those write-ups anymore (or the aforementioned checklists).
It's straight up both not looking good and looking better than ever. Having it be fully hands off remains an issue though.
Eh, I think they're still terrible at architecture. They'll find bugs but they'll try to make them go away instead of building a sustainable system.
They also have a propensity to try to rewrite gigantic amounts of code in one go making changes riskier and harder to scrutinize... without using more LLMs.