Automation : Necessity or Luxury

With the kind of pace that industry works in now, I don’t think that this even qualifies as a valid topic of discussion anymore. Of course automation is necessary. I myself started out as a build and release guy in IT and transitioned over to DevOps, so automation is kind of like my bread and butter. However in this blog, I would like to talk about the “side-effects”, if you will, that have been kicking in for past decade because of this rampant automation in IT and about.

Over the last few years that I have worked as an Automation expert in IT, I have seen a disturbing pattern developing among the IT people. There has been a rush to develop tools and technologies to better user experience. And that’s what IT is supposed to do. isn’t it? However somewhere along the way, we as developers also started seeing ourselves as users and started writing software to better developers experience. Nothing’s wrong with that either. What’s wrong IMHO is the kind of abstraction that these software provides is now dumbing down an entire generation of developers. It’s their unsatisfiable need of abstracting everything behind a pretty screen that worries me. I’ve had teams of developers, with plenty of experience, spending hours upon hours on a rather trivial issue, just because they never thought to look into the server logs for errors. The logs dashboard dint’t had the right filter defined and…