Anxiety of learning Python and Devops (Kubernetes)?

Question

When I go to industry events and meetups I meet a lot of younger devs and more senior people re-tooling their skills. They express frustration that it is not enough to simply update with python, but that you also have to have the devops mindset as well.They feel like the workload is 2x or 3x because the responsibilities have expanded beyond code alone. The anxiety they express is that the goal posts keep moving, and they feel left behind.Question to the group -- have you experienced this, or do you see it among your peers?

potta_coffee · Accepted Answer

I'm in a position where my responsibilities have expanded from just coding to doing a bunch of "devops" things, containers, CICD, clusters (we're using ECS rather than Kubernetes). It's extremely daunting to think about mastering all of these things. My advice is to focus on solving problems. Learn what you need to solve the problem at hand, and then move on. For me, it's the only way I survive. I'd never get anything done if I had to master Kubernetes before actually accomplishing anything.

lunias · Answer

Software architecture has changed a lot with the advent of "the cloud" - which IMO, is just a marketing term for the hybrid of the pre-existing internet and distributed computing. This sort of highly distributed and complex architecture (i.e. microservices) has seemingly become a standard for or at least a mild-expectation of all new applications. In order to wrangle the complexity introduced by an architecture built for 99.9999% uptime and infinite scalability you'll need to learn some tools to help you along the way.
Now, do you need all those things for your app? I think you'll definitely need to know UNIX to a reasonable degree, but all the other stuff (Docker, Ansible, Terraform, CircleCI, Kubernetes, etc. etc.) are just specialized tools for helping alleviate some effort in deployment and infrastructure management.
Start small and use what you want / need.
devops is important because developers tend to know best the requirements / quirks of their application. If you have it running on your laptop it shouldn't be too hard to get it running on a remote server. I'd assert, much easier for the developer of the app than for an ops specialist with no knowledge of the app that they're deploying.
devops can be as simple as a bash script.

itronitron · Answer

I've experienced this in a job interview for a software dev/data scientist position. The hiring manager asked about devops experience (probably specifically docker) and I honestly told them what my experience was (related, but not 'docker'). Their interest in me clearly ended with that and I didn't really care because if devops had been mentioned in the position description I would not have applied.I find the expectation for devops experience to be rather hilarious because if devops was a priority for the company then they would have worked it out and it would be a service available to developers rather than a job responsibility.

PaulHoule · Answer

I worked with some folks who Dockerized most things and were expecting to get it working with Kube but were secretly hoping to put it off as long as they could.