Summary

Charity Majors argues that the software industry has wrongly turned 'operations' into a dirty word, when ops is actually a vital separation of concerns — not a synonym for toil or a label for people who can't code. She traces this cultural rot partly to Google's SRE movement conflating 'writes code' with 'good' and 'does things by hand' with 'bad,' and calls for reclaiming operations as a term of pride to improve actual operational outcomes.

Key Insight

The software industry's cultural contempt for 'operations' is both cause and consequence of poor operational outcomes — reclaiming ops as a term of pride is a prerequisite for building operational excellence.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 9

  Operations is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can't write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.

• 6

  The difference between dev and ops is not about whether or not you can write code. Dude, it's 2026: everyone writes software.

• 5

  Cognitive bandwidth is the scarcest resource in any engineering org, and you want as much of that as possible going towards things that move the business materially forward, instead of wrestling with the messy underbelly.

• 7

  You don't make operational outcomes magically better by renaming the team 'DevOps' or 'SRE' or anything else. You make it better by naming it and claiming it for what it is.

• 5

  The closer you get to laying bits down on disk, the more conservative (and afraid) you should be. The closer you get to user interaction, the more okay it is to get experimental.

Tone

passionate, polemical, irreverent