[BeastMachine]

One additional one I would add is: don't be an ass. I have seen a fair share of people in this role belittle QA, Devs, and interns because they're not able to follow along or understand how to use DevOps tooling.

I like to think of the role as hospitality; you don't particularly have to like the guest but try to create a good working atmosphere.

A specific example: if a particular dev runs to you every time a build fails and tries to blame the environment: force them to check their own work first. If there's another branch that builds, ask if it's related to one of the changes in this branch. Ask if the code builds locally. Ask them what they've tried so far to debug the issue. These questions will help out anyone who does not know how to actually troubleshoot build failures and discourage anyone who is simply trying to pawn off their work.

[donutshop]

The siloing causes tons of issues from what I have observed.

Why do we need a two month lead time now to ship a new static page?

How could we have drifted so far that we need kubernetes for that?

How is it possible that we need a platform team to build yet another later of abstraction from our cloud providers?

Why do we have more yaml than the code we're shipping?

[BeastMachine]

I try to think about developer experience in my day-to-day. K8s might make deployment for the DevOps team easier but more painful for the devs, and that's not good because they are the ones who make the company money. So work together with the developers if they're complaining to make it possible to ship code as fast as possible. If the devs don't like settings in yaml files, find a way to abstract that away (use standardized naming so there's fewer values they have to care about, give sane defaults that won't be overwritten 90% of the time).

The DevOps team's sole existence is there to enable developers to ship better code faster. If DevOps practices are preventing this, that needs to be addressed.