“There’s No Such Thing as a DevOps Engineer!”

“There's no such thing as a DevOps Engineer!”

I'm reading and hearing this a lot at the moment. For the most part I agree (certainly that the actual title is a little woolly at best) but to be a little more expansive here's my two penneth (and my Northern lingo) on what we are referring to from a recruitment percpective.

Of course, DevOps is a methodology. A culture in which everybody is on board sharing the same beliefs and ultimately the same goals.

“So why do you need a DevOps ‘Engineer’!? Surely that means everybody’s a DevOps Engineer, right!?”

Well, for the most part, yes I agree. However, the job of the DevOps Engineer is not to ‘do DevOps’.

Let me explain:

The ultimate goal of DevOps is generally to increase, improve and speed-up releases to meet the needs / goals of the wider organisation. That's all well and good but you can't ‘do DevOps’ by just telling your Developers to “code quicker!” or tell the Ops team to “build faster!”. If you're going to improve the productivity and ultimately the output of your Dev&Ops teams you need to make their jobs easier, faster or best of all; automated (you see where I'm going here)...

Enter the ‘DevOps Engineer’.

Now, I'm not trying to say that every self-proclaimed ‘DevOps Ninja’ wielding Puppet around like he / she is trying to re-enact a scene from Team America is doing this. What I am trying to say is that from those that I have worked with; the likes of MoneySupermarket, TheLADBible, Travelex, Experian that have firstly a solid set of DevOps principles in place and secondly the best Engineers to implement and continuously improve them - yes, they have the right to call themselves a ‘Fuzzy-Wizz-Bang Engineer’ as I saw them called recently.

These are DevOps Engineers in my opinion. These are the guys and girls that continuously make other peoples lives easier. ‘Automating all things’ so that Devs can get on with developing and Ops and can get on with building. They don’t make DevOps. They make what let’s DevOps happen. Create this properly with a continuous tool-chain and you've got the bare bones of DevOps already!

Ultimately, I think the real issue here is that job titles are unimportant (or in fact, probably dead) in this day and age and most [good] companies are operating in a manner that encourages shared responsibility and a ‘no blame’ culture. So we’re all Fuzzy-Wizz-Bang Engineers!

Thanks for reading! Any likes and shares would be gratefully received for my first LinkedIn article.