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Comment by alexandrerond | Hacker News Reader

What I have noticed more and more often lately is people who say:

"Yeah, I'm in team X and I do the Devops part"

So we basically have an "ops" person sitting with the devs, and call the team a "devops" team. The devs have still no idea how to deploy their code. The ops have still no idea how the code looks like. But hey everyone feels better.

This is also true for many job offers in the form of "looking for a devops engineer". No, what they are really looking is for an ops person that has to sit in a dev team and do the part no one likes to do. s/He will be lucky if s/he can actually spend 10% of his time producing application code.

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No, what they are really looking is for an ops person that has to sit in a dev team and do the part no one likes to do. s/He will be lucky if s/he can actually spend 10% of his time producing application code.

So? What's the problem with this? DevOps generally means someone who uses developer like approaches (e.g. scripting, automation, developing one-off solutions, etc) to solve operational issues. It is a role, and someone has to do it, and I would argue that there are people who love to do this role.

But if someone sought a job in DevOps thinking they'd be producing application code, they only fooled themselves. If someone sees some sort of status issue and forever tries to fight against their role, well that's just detrimental to everyone.

If you are solving operational issues, then you are doing ops (regardless of how much is infra-coding), imho.

I always thought of the Devops Engineer as a person who cares about their full stack, both application development and the operation of it, and understands how one affects the other. Something a step further than just infra-coding.

My title is DevOps Engineer and I still don't know what the hell that actually means – but who cares, I was hired to bring a new mindset, not a new toolset, to the development team I sit with. You're right, there's lots of devs here that don't know how to deploy code well or what configuration management is, but part of my job is spreading awareness and continually asking the question: how can we do this better. That is the spirit of DevOps, and that will never die.

What is much, much better than the alternative, where dev sits on their own room, with their own teams, and their own hierarchy, ops do the same, and there's a feud between both.

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