Thread by @patio11

One of the weird things about modern software operations, inclusive of VaccinateCA, is that you're both building a machine while operating a machine, and if you over-rotate on either side of that, you can be surprised how much changes while you're not looking.

Case in point:

Me: "Wait when did we get up to 1,900 locations!?"
Ops: "You know we still call hundreds of places a day, right."
Me: "Yes but I took my eye off that ball to do $OTHER_STUFF for like three days."
Ops: "Again, you know we still call hundreds of places a day, right."

Apropos of nothing, the VaccinateCA experience has increased my credence in a long-held belief:

"Operations" is due for a massive increase in internal status/pay/career prospects within the software industry, like the sysadmin to DevOps transition before it.

(For people who have joined the software industry recently: system administrators used to be considered glorified printer-resetters with some accidental knowledge of scripting, and they were paid about half of what engineers got and were—legendarily—non-professionalized.)

("What changed?" Work which was always factually engineering work got rebranded as engineering work, candidates/incumbent sysadmins at high-status employers rebranded as being engineers / SREs / etc, etc.

There were some tooling changes but that wasn't the major driver.)

"What do you mean when you say Operations?"

The folks who stitch together systems and processes.

At VaccinateCA, they're largely in charge of the machine that makes calls and spits out database rows recording what was said by medical professionals on those phone calls.

*sigh*

<Dangerous Professional voice>
Of course, since California is a two-party consent state, we do not actually record telephone calls, except when we have permission to do so. I was using "recording" in the sense of "recordkeeping" above.
</Dangerous Professional voice>