;)
Yes, let's treat those tasks as less honourable than developers and enjoy the results
I think most people would put these in the same category as developers.
> capacity planning, monitoring and alerting, honing their troubleshooting skills
This is veering into made-up-job world. These people are getting fired. All these tasks can be done by developers.
> This is veering into made-up-job world.
Maybe if you're running a CRUD app on a single server in your basement.
But these are definitely core engineering competencies for any system large enough to experience regular and non-preventable failure. Hardware fails. Technician error happens. A litany of natural disasters from heats wave to flooding can impact a DC or the infrastructure within hundreds of miles of a DC. Load assumptions are violated. Etc. With a large enough footprint, these sorts of things happen often enough that robust monitoring, alerting, and planning are necessary. (Hell, just building a DC requires significant capacity planning, to say nothing of keeping the thing humming along happily.)
Either you're doing this work internally or you're paying AWS/GCP/Azure to do that work for you. In many cases a mix of both. But if you're large enough to need even a small data center, this work is being done by someone.
If you don't know about it, you're either small enough to run your business from a few servers or you're paying someone else a very nice premium to abstract away the details. (Or, most commonly, both.) But if you have any amount of scale, the work is being done by someone.
Anyways, this attitude is probably spot on and is why I expect Twitter to go from "stable if unexceptional business" to "can't even stay online" to "MySpace 2.0" within 10 years.
Capacity planning is everywhere in the real economy. In most sectors, any reasonably sized company will have entire departments and sometimes even divisions (eg, approximately everything in management of a large construction project is capacity planning of some sort or another). One of my first consulting gigs was with a small/small-medium sized resource extraction company, which had several people whose job was essentially 100% capacity planning/forecasting for various components of solid wood product supply chain. Basically anyone who wasn't either in the executive team, in the field, or selling was spending most of their time on capacity planning.
My very first job was with the corporate office at a regional supermarket chain where demand forecasting and figuring out warehousing/storage constraints (aka capacity planning) were their entire job.
In both cases, the profitability of the entire business relied on good capacity planning, full stop. Everything else was either par or total commodity.
Taking the economy as an aggregate, it's actually a fairly rare thing for capacity planning to be totally commodified in the way that hyper-scalars have done in software. Software shops that outsource anything non-soft to the massive army of operations folks at AWS/GCP/Azure are extreme outliers, not the norm, in terms of the real economy a a whole.
Yes DevOps and shift-left and whatnot. All those things do make sense (to some extent) but:
1. When developers own these aspects of the software operation lifecycle they do not produce the same amount of "code" and "features" that an old-school developer would be expected to have.
2. Even in the most utopic DevOps heaven scenario, there are still some people who will be drawn to do more "systemy" things and some developers who will actively resist at investing time at getting good and doing operations stuff. Getting rid of these people is an option of course; good luck.
Ah, the good old Google playbook. If you read their paper about how SRE came to be, it basically say: “we noticed there was friction between developers and system administrators so we fired all our system administrators and hired developers to do their job instead.” It doesn’t really make the job disappear however. It’s just a different way of approaching it.
But if someone’s entire job is “capacity planning”, they’re getting fired.
>I think most people would put these in the same category as developers.
Yet they won't have much code to speak of, and for the bit that they do write, it probably won't be very much in the last 60 days.
It does not work so well for someone who bought a company that made an open sourced language, and then sued another company that wrote its own version of that language, arguing that even the APIs were under copyright.
“IM A PEOPLE PERSON, IM GOOD WITH PEOPLE!”
Funny, since the key job description at oracle is lawyer.
Larry Ellison famously once said "if you aren't a developer, and you aren't a salesman, then tell me real slow just what it is you do".