Platform engineering is dead

Let's finish DevOps first, okay?

I read so many posts and articles these days proclaiming DevOps is dead and Platform Engineering is the new DevOps …

Shouldn’t we try to get the last cultural change right before we will choke on the next one?

Yes we should

When you go through the available projects on popular German job boards today you’ll find a gazillion of opportunities labeled „DevOps“ that are actually software development or classical sysadmin positions.

You gotta know half of the CNCF landscape by heart and for at least 10 years and ideally have a meaningful footprint in some major programming language on top.

90% of the time, though, when you have your first day at those gigs, you realize the job description was more wishful thinking for the future of the organization rather than actual circumstances you would be working in. The issue here is culture and especially in Germany we’re failing hard at changing our culture to really profit from what DevOps is all about.

Instead of investing in their teams’ abilities to collaborate and innovate, companies just blindly hire for certain roles only to shoehorn the talent they acquire into their legacy management systems and hierarchies.

DevOps is about growing closer and working together as engineering teams and owning the technology and responsibility for the projects taken on. It’s not a magical pill that upgrades your organization or supercharges your velocity.

Your organization has to transform along the way to make use of the idea DevOps is all about.

Platforms are a logical outcome of living a DevOps culture. Trying to extract the outcome without doing the chores is exactly what led to the misery that scrum is in today‘s enterprises: you gotta walk the walk before you talk the talk.

Instead, companies try to shop for Platforms and Platform Engineers in the hope of solving all their problems at once. And that’s being capitalized upon by those companies that offer „Developer Platforms“ etc as a one-stop solution to improve engineering outcomes.

But the issue with culture persists. If your organization hasn’t learned to really leverage platforms, it’s just a placebo.

Focus on the culture. Be Agile and don’t blindly follow the Scrum cult. Work towards a DevOps culture and don’t skip to Platform Engineering.