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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

> I think you also missed the problem on this one. If you have "roles for operations" that doesn't involve development, it's not a devops role, it's just an operations role. Sure you can have devops in the mix, but someone doing operations exclusively isn't devops.

It seems we both agree that having a DevOps engineer is not incompatible with DevOps?

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We don't. "Operations" is not a synonym "DevOps".

Devops does involve operations, but is not exclusively that.

Having an Operations person work together with developers doesn't automatically make the Ops engineer into a DevOps engineer. Just as it wouldn't make the non-operations developers into DevOps engineers.

Maybe the better term would be "Operations Engineer for multi-disciplinary Team". Not DevOps.

EDIT: It was previously written "It seems we both agree that having a Ops engineer is not incompatible with DevOps?"

I feel like you misunderstood me. I wasn't arguing about the definition of a "DevOps engineer". Since the author didn't give one, I went by the charity principle and used a definition that would make their argument stronger (a DevOps engineer that really is just an operations engineer). But even with that definition, having an operations engineer on a team does not preclude it from practicing DevOps and is arguably in line with the DevOps practice of increasing collaboration between dev and ops.

The point of the article is that even if we go by your interpretation where "a DevOps engineer that really is just an operations engineer", then we can completely retire the term, since it's not really special and we can just keep using "Operations". The difference between Ops and DevOps isn't just in how the team is organised, but rather what the job itself consists of.

Moreover, in a lot of places there are "DevOps" teams that consist only of Operations people, which is even worse. The usage of DevOps is to attract candidates, not to differentiate the skillset needed.

> The difference between Ops and DevOps isn't just in how the team is organised, but rather what the job itself consists of.

Do you mean that a DevOps engineer's role and skillset is different from an operations engineer? And that hiring DevOps engineers instead of operations engineers is more in line with DevOps?

If we go by the original usage of the term, then yes, it's different skillsets between Ops and DevOps. You can't announce an Ops position with a DevOps title since the two are different by definition.

However, even if we go by your definition that it is the same thing, then the "Dev" part is completely redundant and we should just call it "Ops", since it's by definition the same thing and it doesn't warrant a new title, because it's the exact same thing. However I doubt that's what the case the original article is talking about.

So there is a specific role and skillset for DevOps engineers (going by the original usage of the term), correct? Don't you feel that if you can hire a “DevOps engineer” for a specific role on a software team then we have all lost at using the phrase DevOps?

> So there is a specific role and skillset for DevOps engineers (going by the original usage of the term), correct?

Be careful with that misquoting there: I said "different skillsets", I didn't say necessarily roles. An Ops and a DevOps person will know different things.

> Don't you feel that if you can hire a “DevOps engineer” for a specific role on a software team then we have all lost at using the phrase DevOps?

So, you copy-pasted this from the article. If so I'll assume you're agreeing with them and this conversation can be over.

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