The Real Measure of Success in Platform Engineering | MassDriver CEO Cory O'Daniel

**Cory O'Daniel** (0:00)
If you would have talked to me like two years ago, I was like, I was sunshine, rainbows, kittens, all the good shit on platform engineering, because I saw an opportunity there. I saw a word that was getting popularized, books are getting written, blog posts are getting written. And I was like, this is the moment where we can take this word and we can market it correctly within our orgs to get the buy-in and maybe actually use that to actually get the work done. But what's happening is we're just, it's rebranding very similarly to Ops to DevOps, DevOps to SRE, SRE to Platform Engineers. So you meet some teams where it's like, hey, we're doing platform engineering, we manage all the infrastructure in AWS. It's like, oh, how do you do that? And they're like, we're not software developers, so we just click around AWS. Oh wow, so it's really exactly the same as it was 10 years ago, it's just a different word, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
Tell us if this problem sounds familiar to you. You want to use engineering metrics to improve your work, but every time you try, you realize there's a gap between the metrics world and your team's reality. And even with all the frameworks that already exist, is there enough context to make an informed decision about what metrics to focus on? That's why Linear B is teaming up with Refactoring. Together, we're creating a comprehensive industry report about how engineering teams use data and metrics to improve their practices. But we need your help. This week, we're launching a community survey to collect real world stories that will help us build a practical playbook for tech leaders everywhere. The best stories will be quoted and published with the final survey results. To share your story and get a chance to help engineering leaders everywhere, visit refactoring.fm or head to the link in the show notes.

**Dan Lines** (1:37)
Hey, everyone. welcome back to another episode of Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO. Today, I'm joined by Cory O'Daniel, CEO and co-founder at MassDriver, with over 20 years of experience in DevTools, SRE, Platform Eng. Super excited to have you on the show today. Cory, welcome.

**Cory O'Daniel** (2:05)
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (2:07)
You wrote this, I was reading it before coming on the pod. You wrote this killer article. I was actually late to the pod because I started to click around to the different links. Of course, we've talked with a lot of different pros and DevOps and Platform Eng and all of that. I know you're probably doing it on purpose. You wrote an article called DevOps is Bullshit.
That's me. That's you. I'm sure we'll include it. Where has DevOps gone wrong? How are we failing on this or are we failing to meet business needs? What is your high level take on all this?

**Cory O'Daniel** (2:46)
Yeah. I think one of the key things, and depending on how far you get into the article, I think you realize this, but I'm on your side. If you've got DevOps in your title, I'm on your side. If you know that DevOps shouldn't be a title, I'm also on your side.

**Dan Lines** (2:58)
Yeah.

**Cory O'Daniel** (2:59)
But the way we've gone about it for the past 15, 16 years or so since the term was coined, we've gone about it in a pretty bullshitty way.
When you look at the trends over the past few years, looking at Stack Overflow Survey, looking at number of breaches that we have, the amount of operations expertise that we have as a community is going down year over year because we're making so many developers out of bootcamps, out of colleges and whatnot now, and we're not teaching them the Cloud and operations and whatnot. It's just, hey, you'll get there eventually. You'll learn it in prod at some point in time. You don't come into it knowing it like you do, hey, I came in from a bootcamp, I know Rails, I came in from a bootcamp, I know React, I came in from a university, I know C. Well, this thing is extremely important to how we integrate software or work with other people. It's just, we're just winging it when we get there, right? And so, that's what the article is really about. We've been a bit bullshitty about the way that we've approached it. And what you see a lot is people are like, well, you're just not culturing it right. And it's just like, well, yeah, most people aren't culturing it right. You're right. But most organizations don't have the resources to culture it right. And so this whole idea of like, hey, everybody should do DevOps. We're doing DevOps. You're doing it wrong. You're holding it wrong. Like I think it just kind of undermines all this doing the right work. And I think we need to figure out a way of getting that experience into developers' hands earlier.