DevOps is a body of knowledge, a set of practices to bridge the gap between development and operations and make it as seamless as possible. In that sense, a DevOps engineer exists as much as an Ethical engineer. Yet I don’t see job offerings in asking for the latter.
What the market calls a DevOps engineer is the system administrator or operators of yore. They now sports a new role name as if its the panacea for any engineering process issues. In practice what we see are professionals with low interest in programming and tool-driven problem-solving views pushing their favorite toolkit everywhere they go.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve accepted DevOps roles in the past and I also have my preferences, as seen in this website and radar. Yet the urge to solve problems as a software engineer keeps those preferences at bay until I’m confident that’s indeed the most appropriate option.
The lack of software engineering experience leads such engineers to create heterogeneous solutions that they glue together with scripting languages such as Bash, PowerShell, Python, a bit of praying, some saliva and hope.
Enterprises with serious needs to improve their engineering processes should instead focus on hiring software engineers with a side interest in solving development processes issues, a practice that Google pioneered and made popular with their Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role.