varnav · March 31, 2017 13:37
diff --git a/gistfile1.txt b/gistfile1.txt
 It kinda went like this...

 In the beginning there were developers, testers, sysadmins, dba's, network engineers, and at bigger places operators. By 'beginning' I mean like, a decade ago for where I worked, some places its still this way today.

 This was not a good or natural state of affairs, its just how things were given the tech & talent at the time. It also required a business be big & successful enough to hire some number of people for those roles. Most places there was not a small amount of tension between devs and sysadmins.

 Then the cloud happened. It ate away at the bottom 50% of what sysadmins did, the bottom 20% of what dba's did, and 80% of what network engineers did. At the same time the growth in scripting languages and a mantra of "automate everything" led to most of what testers and operators did getting replaced with scripts and cron jobs (or nowadays jenkins).

 That meant that sysadmins had to shift focus up a half-layer and change their attitude from one of protecting the users and the business from developers mistakes to one of enabling and assisting the developers to build the business safely. That attitude and focus shift was generally the birth of "DevOps", which was only ever supposed to be about development and operations collaboration, not a role, title or department.

 Also around the same time the second-internet-bubble (or the beginning of the glorious thousand-year internet reich) in conjunction with the cloud lead to an explosion of very small companies handling proportionally much higher traffic & load systems. These companies were almost exclusively made of developers at first, and many of them deluded themselves into believing in "NoOps" and that the end of hiring anyone but developers was here.

 One to three years later, if their company was still in existence, they would run into the reality of how wrong they were and desperately need help digging out of the mess they'd gotten themselves into. However, no one can ever admit they were wrong, and the skills they needed were a half a notch up from the traditional sysadmin role (no hardware, more scripting/automation focused), so they just co-opted the buzzphrase that was already becoming popular for this stuff and put up job postings for 'devops engineers'. 90% of those jobs were "oh god please come clean up and on-call babysit this giant dumpster-fire we lit on aws because we can't take it anymore we're burnt out".

 This hiring spree of cloud-and-automation focused sysadmins then brought with it the recruiters. It was really the recruiters doing their "I don't even pretend to care what these words mean" thing that cemented DevOps Engineer as a job title that it was never supposed to be (and in many ways flat out contradicts what its meant to be).

 Larger/Enterprise organizations followed suit a couple years later, always looking for the next trend to chase. Now the job title is pervasive, and many organizations even have an entire DevOps team.

 Some places avoided all this by sticking to the title "Site Reliability Engineer".

 Personally, I don't think developers or sysadmins should be putting 'engineer' in their title until they pass a test, get a license, and carry insurance because they're actually held liable for problems. Network engineers only got away with it because of the CCNP/CCIE program.

 But, here we are. You apply for the jobs that are out there not the jobs that you think should be out there. Generally the devs, recruiters, and PHBs have won and sysadmins have basically been renamed devops.

 https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/3rpzem/devops_vs_sysadmin/cwqmlnd/
	It kinda went like this...

	In the beginning there were developers, testers, sysadmins, dba's, network engineers, and at bigger places operators. By 'beginning' I mean like, a decade ago for where I worked, some places its still this way today.

	This was not a good or natural state of affairs, its just how things were given the tech & talent at the time. It also required a business be big & successful enough to hire some number of people for those roles. Most places there was not a small amount of tension between devs and sysadmins.

	Then the cloud happened. It ate away at the bottom 50% of what sysadmins did, the bottom 20% of what dba's did, and 80% of what network engineers did. At the same time the growth in scripting languages and a mantra of "automate everything" led to most of what testers and operators did getting replaced with scripts and cron jobs (or nowadays jenkins).

	That meant that sysadmins had to shift focus up a half-layer and change their attitude from one of protecting the users and the business from developers mistakes to one of enabling and assisting the developers to build the business safely. That attitude and focus shift was generally the birth of "DevOps", which was only ever supposed to be about development and operations collaboration, not a role, title or department.

	Also around the same time the second-internet-bubble (or the beginning of the glorious thousand-year internet reich) in conjunction with the cloud lead to an explosion of very small companies handling proportionally much higher traffic & load systems. These companies were almost exclusively made of developers at first, and many of them deluded themselves into believing in "NoOps" and that the end of hiring anyone but developers was here.

	One to three years later, if their company was still in existence, they would run into the reality of how wrong they were and desperately need help digging out of the mess they'd gotten themselves into. However, no one can ever admit they were wrong, and the skills they needed were a half a notch up from the traditional sysadmin role (no hardware, more scripting/automation focused), so they just co-opted the buzzphrase that was already becoming popular for this stuff and put up job postings for 'devops engineers'. 90% of those jobs were "oh god please come clean up and on-call babysit this giant dumpster-fire we lit on aws because we can't take it anymore we're burnt out".

	This hiring spree of cloud-and-automation focused sysadmins then brought with it the recruiters. It was really the recruiters doing their "I don't even pretend to care what these words mean" thing that cemented DevOps Engineer as a job title that it was never supposed to be (and in many ways flat out contradicts what its meant to be).

	Larger/Enterprise organizations followed suit a couple years later, always looking for the next trend to chase. Now the job title is pervasive, and many organizations even have an entire DevOps team.

	Some places avoided all this by sticking to the title "Site Reliability Engineer".

	Personally, I don't think developers or sysadmins should be putting 'engineer' in their title until they pass a test, get a license, and carry insurance because they're actually held liable for problems. Network engineers only got away with it because of the CCNP/CCIE program.

	But, here we are. You apply for the jobs that are out there not the jobs that you think should be out there. Generally the devs, recruiters, and PHBs have won and sysadmins have basically been renamed devops.

	https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/3rpzem/devops_vs_sysadmin/cwqmlnd/