DevOps is broken

The problem the term 'devops' is addressing, the way I understand it, isn't that of insufficient individual jack-of-tradesness, but that of too much separation between (internal) organisations. It should be perfectly possible to build a "devops" team from deeply specialized experts and turning it into a job description seems quite a stretch to me.

But you might actually want some jack-of-trades types nonetheless, because those isolated organizations weren't completely without merit: they are good at solving that problem affectionately called the bus factor. A single ops guy in a devops team is a single point of failure and the mitigation preparation of keeping some of the not-so-ops peers sufficiently in the loop will be much more dependent on organic motivation than the counterpart in a specialist company branch. There, substitutability would be much easier to ensure with formal process.

I just kept asking questions until I found the one she missed.

I also ended up becoming a bespoke VxWorks admin because the guy who volunteered was never available, and someone asserted my code wasn't working well on VxWorks, so of course I had to know enough to do benchmarks. I fixed a few problems but the real issue was the hard drive wasn't doing DMA due to the kernel not recognizing the processor revision number.

Somewhere between those two events I realized that if my part of the project is great but the whole project is on fire, nobody cares about my stuff. I don't get points for being right and the team being wrong. I mean, I do for some people, but I still feel bad at the end of the project, and those are the 'points' I have to live with the most.

The way that played on on the latter project is that once we got our shit together, we started work stealing from our peer orgs. Volunteering to carve off little pieces of interface between us and 'take care' of this bit of data handling here and that one over there. I came to realize that the Org subconsciously knew this and any past success they had was due to self-organization and collective work-stealing.

Throw people at it, turn a blind eye to precise mission statements, and hope for the best.

Now I am working at a large org for an internal application. There is an ops team I push code to github and Jenkins runs the CI and deploys it to a dev environment. I push a button in Jenkins to deploy to production. In two years there has been one ops related issue where I had to bump up the memory limit from 2GB to 4GB. There is a single server and a database. Setup works fine for a few thousand concurrent users. My skills are in development and understanding business reqs, not mucking about in config files. There are people that are good at that and enjoy doing that, let them handle it.