Team member who specializes at updating dependencies in large team/org?

Question

Out of curiosity, in large software teams or organizations, are there developers who specialize in updating dependencies? (The developer can contribute actual code and whatnot, but their top priority would be in keeping dependencies up to date.)My hypothesis is that, given a large enough team or organization, a large enough number of projects, and a large enough number of dependencies, there may be some benefit in having somebody who specializes in keeping (3rd-party) dependencies up-to-date, in terms of economy of scale and correctness in applying updates.If you have 10 projects that use the same dependency (let's say django-rest-framework), would it be better to have one person who spends time really grokking the release notes and adapting the codebase for breaking changes? If you know how to update django-rest-framework for one project, you probably know how to do it for another project, right?

giantg2 · Accepted Answer

Nope.I have usually picked up the upgrade and other sucky work for the teams I've been on. It's a thankless job and they rate you low for not delivering business value. Same with the security work I do. You end up as a generalist, and most places only value specialists.

fdgsdfogijq · Answer

Without explicitly saying this, many people have this job. They may get feature work in between, but an astounding amount of time is spent keeping software up to date.