I feel like there has always been a contingent of sysadmin / ops folks who preferred the "Better to ask for forgiveness than permission" model. They still hate when things break, (so not quite fans of developers with a "move fast and break things" philosophy) but they care more about big picture improvements and ease of upkeep than enforcing any particular process. Detecting problems and being able to roll back is typically more valuable than preventing mistakes in many cases. It may be somewhat driven by laziness, but it actually works out pretty well for collaborating with the fast-moving developer types. It also does depend on being in an environment that is tolerant to occasional mistakes or outages.
It makes sense that these types naturally gravitated towards the devops models. I'm really not sure where this leaves the more compliance-minded systems folks though.
> It makes sense that these types naturally gravitated towards the devops models. I'm really not sure where this leaves the more compliance-minded systems folks though.
Working for profitable businesses where stability is valued over velocity.
It's rough because, like many backend type jobs, the best thing that can happen is nothing breaks. Incremental improvements in stability or scalability will not be noticed, but every single change you make is a massive risk of a page at 2am, all-nighters trying to fix things, outage reports, incident reports, root cause analysis reports, etc. You're stuck between process and outcome.
You have to constantly fight the urge to just never touch anything.
It makes sense that these types naturally gravitated towards the devops models. I'm really not sure where this leaves the more compliance-minded systems folks though.