Is DevOps burnout actually a thing?

Are we in the middle of the Great DevOps Burnout? 🤔

A report from Haystack suggests yes. 83% of the 258 software engineers surveyed reported feelings of burnout from high workloads, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets. 74% of software engineers surveyed reported working on operations tasks in some capacity.

This survey from Spacelift follows a similar theme. They found that “DevOps engineers are more frequently stressed than the IT average. Over 40% admit to being stressed ‘often’ or ‘very often’ compared to 34% of the IT average.” The study suggests that DevOps are the most stressed because they feel their skills are insufficient for their jobs. Are their skills insufficient or does their setup lack a platform that provides sufficient support?

In other words, it seems that a lot of folks “doing DevOps” are also burnt out. I think we have more research to do before we pinpoint the exact causes of this stress. But I don’t think the trend is a coincidence.

There is a growing conversation in the DevOps community about whether developers can or want to take on operations tasks. The main problem they’re encountering is cognitive load, which prevents developers from focusing on developing features and delivering the most value to the company. The organization’s efficiency suffers as a result. It’s possible that developers’ well-being is suffering also.

But I want to hear your thoughts. Are you feeling the “Great DevOps Burnout”?

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 Ihor Dvoretskyi, Sr. Developer Advocate at CNCF and member of the Ukrainian armed forces were greeted by thunderous applause on the KubeCon stage. From the @linuxfoundation Twitter account: "It has been incredible watching the open source community rally behind him and his sacrifice."

🥐 From Whitney Lee and Mauricio Salatino's KubeCon keynote: "Platform teams are key for success - let developers focus on code and platform teams can simplify their experience getting to production."

🥐 The New Stack's panel about how Kubernetes shapes the dynamic between dev and ops turned into a conversation about platform engineering. Questions asked/answered included: How does platform engineering relate to DevOps? What's the golden standard for building your platform? Is DevOps actually dead? Keep an eye on your inbox next week to see a recap of this 🔥 conversation.

🥐 Have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are this week's highlights:

• Good alternatives to Backstage?
• On the complexity of AWS and other tools
• All the features an IDP should have
• On working for a company that requires their app to host thousands or even millions of images on s3 searching for challenges and help
• Short conversation on team topologies
• Provision production level infrastructure with Terraform CDK

Like what you've read? Share it with your friends 🤗

This newsletter is a community effort, so if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way. You can share your ideas here.

Cya next week!

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca