I figure there may be some folks out there with a strong split between Ops and Engineering in their orgs, and maybe even Architecture in some circles. How do you handle that inter-team interaction and is compensation adjusted for the Ops people? What do you prefer?
At my org we have a pretty clear split and our Ops folks, while generally good to work with, tend to complain about "Engineering Shit Sandwiches" even though we can never pull them into design discussions and when we query them for input or pain points it is generally vague stuff like "make sure it doesn't suck". it is almost like a cultural thing with that group. Only a couple of folks will actually engage you to learn a product and they get pulled away often because engaging EVERYTHING which makes them just as useless.
Being on the Engineering team we are often faced with major forklift upgrade and new implementation and integration of products, up to day 1 support, and hand-off of the project. It is a large undertaking as Architecture or Engineering or even Ops sees a need and it is up to Engineering to take the "need a new Switch Fabric" request and go. We investigate vendors, run PoCs, deal with CAB and review boards, test, set up, document, troubleshoot, everything. It becomes a very deep dive into that one solution and you can very easily be pigeon-holed into your couple of projects because of the scale. The ownership of these products also follows you throughout your entire tenure as you are now known as the "The Arista Guy" because that is the vendor you chose due to whatever reason; good or bad. The trade-off is the work, while long at times, is a lot more steady and there is a lack of on-call and true spikes in workload (I think this is the main reason Ops gives us shit).
The Ops team handles tickets and thanks to our outsourced workflow they generally don't handle mundane provisioning requests unless the queue gets too big. I have been in Ops and understand the work can equally challenging when anomalous, hard to track activity is seen. Different time zones, language barriers, levels of technical expertise, etc all make this more challenging. There is also the on-call aspect of which I don't think is formally acknowledged. There is a wink and a node for adjusting time worked to ensure you aren't getting hammered but we all know how that is; you just end up working in silent mode at home. I will note that sitting by that team they have a lot of downtimes and are very quick to toss "Engineering problems" back to us even if it is something like a circuit being undersized due to a project misquoting the number of users for the entire project. I think they look at our workflow and are horribly jealous.
Now here is where I have the issue. I have done Ops for 3 years and Engineering for 3 years. I kind of enjoy Ops more. The on-call can suck but the tasks are much more straight forward break-fix and I personally enjoy helping people. While the technical skill-set is near equivalent there are minor twists there. Ops mainly focus on getting something working and needs to be quick and internalize a few critical aspects. Engineering needs to be slow and methodical to follow best practices and can't internalize such a vast amount of information because I am going far deeper into this specific technology and not touching half of what we have to know stuff like "this specific code version always throws this error; Engineering needs to upgrade them all".
I really can't complain overall, I enjoy my job and all my teammates are great folks, it just gets annoying when you go out of your way to craft a solution for a problem and all you get is flak from the Ops team, told how easy your job, and accused of not doing your best job. It may just be cultural but still frustrating.
No comments:
Post a Comment