I was incredibly frustrated with everyone I spoke to having a different definition of DevOps. For many it’s just sysadmins rebadged. For others they think they sysadmins couldn’t code so it’s an evolution. For yet more they think it’s feature developers who manage ops.
Nobody has a formal definition that fits, the term only exists to obfuscate responsibility.
But it was quickly coopted to be "ops, but cooler" because these sysadmins write code too. And then even that definition started to get coopted by people using it for other things. These days it can mean anything. Frankly, I see it as a small red flag. Anyone who uses it is basically jumping on yesterday's trendy jargon, and that's not a good sign.
I agree that Development should be mostly self-service and that the goal of any "Ops" person is to get out of the way. "Automate yourself out of a job" is a common sysadmin mantra.
However I don't agree with your other points, there's some over exaggeration when you say "if devops doesn't exist then thats a red flag", if devops can mean anything then it's a useless term and absence of it shouldn't be seen as a red flag.
>Shoud DevOps engineer be a role? Yes. Absolutely.
Small typo here, and of course I disagree with the statement and preceding paragraph.
I think "Platform Engineer" is closer to what your definition of DevOps is.
The point of my post is that everyone has their own definition, which is why I'm frustrated at the term.
> Infrastructure Engineer
Regarding this... This is actually my job title right now, but it exists outside of computing: "Infrastructure Engineer" being the kind of person who makes bridges and roads and so on.
Reminds me of an old old joke.
There are two kinds of Engineers. Mechanical Engineers who build weapons, and Civil Engineers who build targets.