We are supposed to be one team. That’s the whole idea behind DevOps. Collaboration, shared responsibility, tearing down the silos. But if you have worked in the trenches, you know the real tension is between DevOps and the developers.
Sometimes it’s subtle, just a passive-aggressive comment in a pull request. A quiet sigh when I asked the developer to write a rollback plan. Other times, it’s more direct: Why is the pipeline so slow? It worked on my machine, so it must be your infra.
We deploy the code. We monitor the services. We clean up the mess when something breaks. And when it does break, guess who everyone looks at first? Not the engineer who merged untested code. Not the PM who pushed for a Friday evening release. No, it’s the DevOps team, staring at dashboards, trying to figure out what just exploded. I’m not saying devs are the enemy, thats far from it. I’ve worked with some brilliant, empathetic developers who care deeply about stability and respect the ops side of the house. But I’ve also worked with others who treat infrastructure like a vending machine: insert code, expect it to just work.
Part of the problem is visibility. Developers don’t always see what goes into running a stable, secure, scalable system. They are unaware of the emergency patching, the escalating cloud costs, and the complexity behind a “simple” blue-green deployment. To them, it’s just YAML and noise.
So we clash. They want speed. We want safety. They want to ship. We want things not to catch fire at 2 am.
But here’s the thing: we both want the same outcome. Happy users. Reliable software. A company that doesn’t grind to a halt during a launch. The conflict comes from misalignment, not malice. That’s why I’ve started spending more time in planning meetings. Asking more questions during standups. Showing devs exactly what happens behind the curtain when they click “deploy.” It’s not always smooth. But it’s helping.
DevOps isn’t just about automation; it’s about building bridges. Sometimes that means writing clean Terraform. Sometimes it means sitting down with a developer and saying, “Hey, I get it. Let’s make this work together.” Because the real enemy? It’s not each other. It’s downtime.
