There Is No Such Thing As A DevOps Engineer
Tags: sitereliabilityengin, development, sre, devops
Published: 2023-02-11 06:33:18

---
title: There Is No Such Thing As A DevOps Engineer
published: true
date: 2020-12-08 03:13:34 UTC
tags: sitereliabilityengin,development,sre,devops
canonical_url: https://kazimurtaza.medium.com/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-devops-engineer-a426209c3ab5
---

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*p89Z4TVwAMlHQuuTmx2Y0Q.jpeg)<figcaption>Senior DevOps Engineer</figcaption>

This piece of jumble up words is not going to define What DevOps is; if anything, if you require that information I would suggest reading **The Phoenix Project** , this book truly contributes to the solution, with which it was coined back in 2009, after Phoenix project, DevOps started trending and everyone started jumping on the bandwagon, with no one really knowing, what it is, or what it means, they just knew some tools with which you could automate ops stuff.

Cloud providers came into the picture couple years ahead, which encouraged automation and thus the role came into existence **DevOps Engineer** , it skyrocketed from there on and everyone who was something wanted to migrate to DevOps role. It became so important for a growing organization, this person was a must.

Now every company who had a DevOps Engineer thought they were at the bleeding edge.🤣I was also in that said bandwagon, I might still be 😁

I am not saying we should not do DevOps, we are definitely at the right place, just as agile is important, so is DevOps, but it is Culture or Practice, not a ROLE…

So now you have three departments Developer, IT and DevOps, now SIR; you went totally wrong, DevOps Practice suggests to break the silos of the developers and IT, but you went ahead and created a third silo. 👏

When in reality, it was the job of Technical Architect, Product Owner, Team Lead, Cloud Architect or Site Reliability Engineer, to take up the mantle of **DevOps practitioner** , because only at that position are you truly aware of the best practices. DevOps is always bred inside or bringing in a contractor at early stages. The adoption of DevOps was always going to be the responsibility of a Developer or Ops person, but both of them cannot call themselves **A DevOps Engineer — because there is no such thing.**

The proper term for a Dev or an Ops person who has taken up DevOps Practices is **Site Reliability Engineer(SRE) — **_Wikipedia definition is _— _SRE is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems._

“_Every infrastructure guy should live a developer’s life as well, supporting and automating those tools the same way as developers automate business processes. Even though DevOps is a rapidly growing field and “DevOps engineers” are in hot demand, it’s important to keep in mind that DevOps is not a skill of one person. Everybody in your dev team must know Linux, Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, and Ansible, at least on a user level, as well understand networking and deployment architecture_” — [Stepan Pushkarev](https://www.infoworld.com/author/Stepan-Pushkarev/), Contributor, [InfoWorld](https://www.infoworld.com/article/3263812/do-not-hire-a-devops-engineer.html) **March 23rd 2018.**

The opinion of Stepan above, is not what I am suggesting; one cannot cover everything, I am just asking break the boxes you are in, don't specialize in just one thing, for example, a developer who only knows best java code to write, this will not suffice anymore, let us take an example; there are two people one who is the master of java and writes code like it is a symphony, and other who can write adequate java code, but has knowledge distributed systems, deployment practices and cloud computing technologies, who would you hire?

**“DevOps is also characterized by operations staff making use of many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work.” ** — [Ernest Mueller](https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/), Aug 2, 2010, Last Revised Jan 12, 2019

**“DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support” ** — Ernest Mueller  
**“I believe the fundamental DevOps values are effectively captured in the Agile Manifesto” — Ernest Mueller**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/320/1*H74evsOv5TFIq9vfATi3Tw.gif)

**“It is not “they’re taking our jobs!” Some folks think that DevOps means that developers are taking over operations and doing it themselves. Part of that is true and part of it isn’t.” ** — Ernest Mueller

**_“DevOps is a culture, not a role! The whole company needs to be doing DevOps for it to work”_** _ — _[_Irma Kornilova_](https://medium.com/@neonrocket?source=post_page---------------------------)

[**Arghcisco**](https://www.reddit.com/user/arghcisco/) **had a funny definition for DevOps** : “_you have two cows. One thinks you’re an SRE and the other one thinks you maintain the developers’ Jenkins pipelines for a living. Somehow you’re paid $300k/year for closing random issues assigned to you despite no one being able to explain what your job is. To avoid slowly going insane, you’ve been putting your CS degree to work by training a TensorFlow model to distinguish hot dogs from not hot dogs.”_

**In Conclusion,** DevOps Is a practice just as Agile is. Now that we have clarity SRE is the role everyone needs to upscale on, if they are interested specifically in this paradigm, how it is different from cloud engineer is a story for another day, but I believe Cloud Engineer is a subpart of SRE, so is Build Engineer. SRE would be someone who is comfortable with software engineering Principles, Development for Ops processes just like Developer would automate business processes.

This blog is an opinion that I share with many others around the world, it is totally subjective.

**References:**  
1 . [DevOps Team Roles And Responsibilities](https://hackernoon.com/devops-team-roles-and-responsibilities-6571cfb56843)  
2. [There Is No Such Thing As A DevOps Engineer](https://www.prodops.io/blog/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-devops-engineer)  
3. [Do not hire a DevOps engineer](https://www.infoworld.com/article/3263812/do-not-hire-a-devops-engineer.html)  
4. [DevOps is a culture, not a role!](https://medium.com/@neonrocket/devops-is-a-culture-not-a-role-be1bed149b0)  
5. [What Is DevOps?](https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/)  
6. [No, You Are Not a DevOps Engineer](https://www.astroarch.com/tvp_strategy/devops-engineer-25120/)  
7. [There’s No Such Thing as a “DevOps Team”](https://continuousdelivery.com/2012/10/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-devops-team/)  
8. [You are not a DevOps Engineer](https://garywoodfine.com/not-devops-engineer/)  
9. [What The Hell Is DevOps?](https://www.toptal.com/devops/what-the-hell-is-devops)