Operations is a competitive advantage
The payoff for doing a good, boring job is making stuff happen and moving on the cool stuff, instead of cobbling together patch after hack after ad-hoc solution. Bleh.
The tools exist and there are many many system administrators who know how to utilize them. Of course there are a lot of drones who insist on hand editing files and doing things the hard way but with some care you can avoid employing guys like that.
Many people think of Operations as "a bunch of boring work... which I'm hoping someone else is doing."Boring work that I happen to enjoy. Here is why I enjoy it so much:
The example above is the tale of two Web 2.0 startups scaling to 20 systems during their first three months. The first team starts writing software and installing systems as they go, waiting to deal with the "ops stuff" until they have an "ops person". The second team dedicates someone to infrastructure for the first few weeks and ramps up from there. They won't need to hire an "ops person" for a long time and can focus on building great technology.
The payoff for doing a good, boring job is making stuff happen and moving on the cool stuff, instead of cobbling together patch after hack after ad-hoc solution. Bleh.
The tools exist and there are many many system administrators who know how to utilize them. Of course there are a lot of drones who insist on hand editing files and doing things the hard way but with some care you can avoid employing guys like that.
