Before DevOps was en vogue (i.e. was a descriptive term more so than a buzz word), the whole premise was to collapse the bulwark between engineers and sys admins. All SWE's should care about how their application is deployed, monitored, and scaled in production. This leads to far better application engineering outcomes in most efforts in which I've been involved.
The end result of those efforts was often, but not always, engineers writing some amount of operations tooling themselves.
But now we've come full circle. There is a ton of operations tooling you can pull off the shelf, and those tools are generic/complex enough to require administration. So many DevOps roles now as a result, particularly in larger orgs, are mostly administration-focused and less so about building the tooling itself.
It feels like we've reinvented the bulwark we tried to escape previously. There's an open question as to whether, from a practical perspective, we still have gained a net win there irrespective of the logical separation between eng and ops. I'm not sure where I've landed yet on that question.
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