this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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"IT people" here, operations guy who keeps the lights on for that software.
It's been my experience developers have no idea how the hardware works, but STRONGLY believe they know more then me.
Devops is also usually more dev than ops, and it shows in the availability numbers.
Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.
My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?
You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.
While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.
They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.
So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are
Game development is a very specific use case, and NOT what most people think of when talking about devs vs ops.
I'm talking enterprise software and SaaS companies, which would be a MUCH larger part of the tech industry then games.
There are a large number of devs who think public cloud as infrastructure is ALWAYS the right choice for cost and availability for example... Which in my experience is actually backwards, because legacy software and bad developers fail to understand the limitations of this platforms, that it's untrustworthy by design, and outages insue.
In these scenarios understanding how the code interacts with actual hardware (network, server and storage or their IaaS counterparts) is like black magic to most devs... They don't get why their designs are going to fall over and sink into the swamp because of their nievete. It works fine on their laptop, but when you deploy to prod and let customer traffic in it becomes a smoking hole.