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After the question about job role boundaries of a DevOps engineer has been closed, I'd like to share that I feel a strong disagreement and disharmony about that.

Indeed, the question is not of a technical matter "what X do I need to do to make Y work after I've tried Z and got an F error".

Nevertheless, the facts of the real world are as far as I can relate:

  • there are many "DevOps engineer" jobs out there (despite of the fact that this must be a misunderstanding)
  • partly, as our new member confirms, there are organizations where a DevOps engineer is sort of an extended system administrator. This is also by the way imho a sad circumstance that we have more system- and ops- related questions than development related questions similar to "how do I prototype containers in my IDE" either "how do I automate virtual infrastructure prototyping in context X".

So then I think it's very legitimate to ask a question at the biggest Q&A site for DevOps, what are the boundaries in this job role.

Closing such questions will keep us away from focusing on the actual DevOps culture which is one of the main drivers why we have this community.

Therefore I can't understand how much is the question not having enough focus (this was the reason to close) also given that obviously some folks have found the accepted answer helpful, and there is one another good answer.

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    Hi Peter. I was one of the close voters. I think this particular question is very broad, as it asks for boundaries of a job role, which can be different across organizations and across teams too sometimes. I also think DevOps is not a title, its a philosophy (but that's a very personal opinion). + I think you did a very good job at answering it. Having said that, I dont have any issues if enough reopen votes get cast on that qn, cause I think your answer deserves more audience :)
    – Dawny33
    Jan 31, 2020 at 5:14

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Because as you put it: Devops as a job role is not something universally agreed on and is mostly used as a Buzzword. Hence it's not even answerable with educated guess from experience.

What this question could gather as answers is everyone "my 2cts" and an endless debate of people willing to correct others answers because they disagree.

I'd say the boundaries are probably implied enough in What is the difference between Sysadmin and DevOps Engineer? answers.

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I concur with your disharmony; the job title is becoming more prevalent, despite the fact that its use goes directly against the philosophical tenets of DevOps. That warrants pause, because people are asking for advice about a real-life situation.

However, the use of DevOps Engineer as a job title is so variable between organizations that it would be tough to give practical advice beyond "check your job description". IT's a quandary. I haven't seen the specific question, but questions like this need narrow scope to best be answered in this sort of forum.

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