Work-life balance in DevOps

Let's take a break from purely technical topics today. I'll explain why DevOps is the best field in IT if you want to maintain a healthy work-rest balance while keeping the rest of the company's departments happy 👽😁.

Doctors used to be paid as long as a person stayed healthy; likewise, DevOps engineers should be paid as long as everything keeps working.

But that doesn't mean you can just quickly knock everything out and then sleep and relax. To make everything run like clockwork takes considerable effort, plus testing many architecture options and fault-tolerant designs that may, under certain conditions, fail to work — and then you'll have to think it all through again. You also need to build the right interaction with other departments, for example with development.

✔️However, step by step, you can build a stable way of working that won't mess with your head at the most inconvenient time. Ideally, all work should be planned rather than emergency work that yanks you out like a radish from a garden bed.

In other words, striving to reduce the amount of work is a very healthy pursuit that benefits everyone.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets this — neither on the management side nor on the engineering side. The former want to see maximum busyness and force people to put on a show of frantic activity, while the latter sometimes simply don't strive to improve processes, which is essentially a violation of the very philosophy of DevOps.