Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Yet another new occupation comes from yet another bad practice.

For the past several years surveying the job market, I kept finding ads for a position called DevOps. Some reading and discussions sort of brought me to an understanding of what that is.

Once again, I learned that I did this new job some 25 years ago. Back then, however, it was known as managing the work. It seems that a number of managers managed the work so poorly that someone created an occupation to do this work properly so the managers wouldn’t have to try in vain to do it.

A generation ago I managed the work of two dozen persons who were swirling all day. Some were developers, some were system administrators, while some were users of the computers and software. I recall pacing all day behind the cubicles off all these persons asking some to wait a minute or two while someone else set up the system for them. Then I would ask an administrator to wait a minute or two while a user’s task finished. Then I…eight or ten hours went by quickly.

This managing the work wasn’t easy. I felt unprepared to do this, but I did it, and we all worked together to do our jobs.

What happened? Why did we create an occupation to do the job of the managers?

My guess is that managers didn’t want to manage so we whined enough that senior managers hired someone to do our job for us. Eventually, a new occupation was born. These new DevOps persons do our job for us. If they fail, we can fire them and hire someone else to do our job for us.

Perhaps we could just do our job ourselves no matter the difficulty. Then again, I am somewhat naive about all this.