Because DevOps in a lot of organizations is really “help desk for clueless developers”, conversations like this happen a lot:

Dev “hey the thing seems to be not working right”

Me “what does that even mean? I need you to be a good deal more specific. What thing. What isn’t working?”

Dev “I dunno”

Me “Are there error messages?”

Dev “yes”

Me “….would you like to share them with me?”

Dev *sends error*

Me “ok did you actually read this error message?”

Dev “yes”

Me “…so you’re good then? It says you’re trying to use a variable that hasn’t been declared yet. You should fix that. “

Dev “…”

Me “good luck”

How TF did they get in a job?

@Demolishun I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know because the answer would say worse things about my company for hiring this developer than it does the developer not knowing how to read an error message.

A lot of devs are lazy scumbags.

When sth doesn't work right, it would take their effort to make it work. And if they can't make it work, they'd be at fault.

Hence let someone else do the job.

Why does a Dev approach a DevOps guy for variable declaration errors?

@asgs It feels like before I got here six months ago the company just decided to say “we’re going to hire site reliability engineers” without any real clue what the fuck they were doing and told the devs “now whenever you have problems just go bother the SRE”.

However we got here, it’s happening way too much, it’s burning me out already, and as of an hour ago I told my director “If this is what the company wants out of an SRE that’s fine, but I also need to know that so I can look for a different job because it’s very different from what I was sold during the interview”.

He acknowledged the email and promised to save it for our next 1:1.

@ComputerToucher that's really bad

Our SRE team built a tool to look for log statements as part of every develop merge and it sends a notif to each and every person who modifies a file which already has some log statements without actually doing a diff. While this is an extra waste of the precious time SREs have, it is nearly not as bad as helping newbies with their coding errors

A little disturbing he cant figure out the error. That’s basic intro to programming level shit. It’s almost like he’s never coded before.

He can’t even communicate properly.

Dev: um something is broke.

OP: what, exactly?

Dev: duh um I dunno but something broke and stuff

Same! I just left a shop where DevOps was really just tech support for junior devs. It’s common, and unacceptable use of DevOps talent.

@TeachMeCode I would say it is a core computer user competency. At least google the error to start. Then if you get stuck ask for help.

@Demolishun yeah, he could’ve shown SOMETHING positive about him by copy pasting the message into a search engine and showing a little drive but nope. Im even more confused that he was hired as a dev to begin with

@ComputerToucher do you know this guy’s past experience? If not that’s cool as you’re not the manager but I’m a bit weirded out how he was hired without knowing what a variable is. This is coding 101 bare basic shit you’d learn day one.

@TeachMeCode I know nothing of this person’s past dev experiences