Thinking Like a Developer?

Let’s be honest. Fair or not, there tends to be a hierarchy to the technology career ecosystem. Certain disciplines simply don’t get no respect. I’d say the respect level goes like this:

• Helpdesk support
• Network technicians
• Platform infrastructure
• Data engineers
• Application developers
• “Distinguished” engineers (whatever that is)

Some organizations enforce this perception by bringing the application developers into product meetings early on, giving them cozy seating assignments, rubbing their feet, and telling them how pretty they are. Meanwhile, the infrastructure team is told last-minute about a major product rollout and shoved into a windowless basement while management tells them they’re ugly and no one will ever love them. Everyone points the finger at the other team. Developers blame the platform team. The platform team blames the developers. And everyone blames the network team, even though it’s never a network problem. “My API says my JSON is malformed. Must be a network problem!” To be fair, it’s not the developers’ fault things turned out this way. It’s society’s fault. If everyone told you that you were amazing all the time and that you shouldn’t be shunned for being such a nerd, you’d believe it, too.

Sometimes I hear that people who work with infrastructure as code should consider themselves developers. I like the sentiment, but I don’t know if I fully agree with the statement. I’m going to split the difference and say, “yeah, we’re kinda developers.” Us platform people aren’t writing the same type of logical flow that you’d find in imperative languages, like JavaScript. But we are going to use a lot of logic if we are doing our job right. So yeah, we are writing code, but it’s just not the same type of code.

I don’t really like the comparison between application developers and platform engineers because I think it perpetuates this idea that the role of a software engineer is something at the “next level.” We do a different thing that requires different skills. I like working on the platform side and find it very fulfilling. If you are a platform infrastructure engineer and are feeling jealousy, my advice is to ignore it and just do the best job you can. As Eleanor Roosevelt probably didn’t say, “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

After saying all that, I’m going to reverse myself and say that we should still borrow some concepts and practices from developers that will help us do our jobs better. Don’t think of these as things that developers do. Think of them as things that all engineers should know. See my Infrastructure as code Principles post for some ways of approaching your platform role that will help you do your job better.