Should a programmer, upon receiving an order, also perform the role of a devops?

Question

Web development

faced with the fact that they found me offered an order. I started to do it and it turned out that a tricky auto-deploy was set up there that went beyond my skills, there was no one to transfer the cases to (there is no person who would transfer the cases to me) and no one would help to deploy, and the instruction is like this ... I locally cannot have their infrastructure consisting of from several services in different programming languages. Docker doesn't help. There are too outdated libraries and versions of frameworks. I just didn't unfold.
so I carried on for more than one week before finally giving up. Of course I got offended. but after all, I didn’t get a penny for the time spent and I would have received it only for solving the proger tasks themselves if I managed to deploy this project at home. and I would have received exactly an hourly rate for the time spent on solving tasks that were not difficult for me.

For another client, everything was easier. As soon as I complained that the project was not developing, they gave me the contact of the devops and he solved everything.

Now I am inclined to the fact that if the programmer cannot immediately deploy the environment due to nuances, then he has the right to demand Devops from the client. After all, he does not have to be able to fix all sorts of problems with incompatibility of packages, by trial and error to solve pitfalls and set himself many versions of php and js. And writing code on the client server side is a perversion. besides, to delve into the essence of auto-deploy as they set it up with their ingenious system administrator, who stopped communicating.

In general, is it possible to require a client to provide a depope before work begins on his tasks?
And is it possible to demand from him if he hired you for the backend so that he would attract a front-end developer if you yourself cannot understand something in the tricky js code?

Answer 1

Owe who? The debt to the customer is determined by the clauses of the contract. If you did not agree to do the work of devops, then you should not do it. But personally, I think that I should be able to make turnkey decisions myself. True, for this I always cheated a price equal to the payment of a backend developer, frontend, admin, analyst and project manager.

Answer 2

Who is currently deploying the infrastructure locally and for what? If the client has devops, then he must prepare a separate dev server for each developer there - in the client's infrastructure with auto-deploy to the test server and so on.
If you do not combine the devops function in yourself, then when you take an order, just say right away: to complete the order, you need access to your dev-server, which you allocate personally for me for the duration of my work. All.

Answer 3

You can carefully learn the terms of reference before starting work.
Now you have the experience that you need to clarify the issue of infrastructure with the customer before taking on an order.
And so - there is no "can not" or "can". There are agreements and payments.
DevOps is also not a universal person. If devops has worked with virtualization for 5 years, and then he was asked to deal with AWS, he will also look at the new gates.