[Johnny555]

We're more integrated with Dev than a traditional "ops" role where Dev throws the code over the fence at Ops and says "Deploy it!" and Ops throws it back if there's a problem and says "Fix it!"

Our devops team sits in on design and code reviews to help ensure that operational needs are met early on in the process, and we'll change code to fix bugs or support operational needs. We're not full developers and won't rearchitect entire systems, but we will do bug fixes when we can.

So now we're back to square one and we actually need to evaluate people and teams based on their knowledge and skill

Have we ever left that square?

[brazzledazzle]

Sounds like your devops and dev teams do devops which is great. I wasn't trying to imply that they don't or that they had the same problems that prompted the movement, only that your roles are divided the same way as traditional dev and ops even if you do in fact do them smarter than average. What I'm getting at is that "devops" as a title is an (internal) marketing term.

You're right that every org defines devops differently but it's totally and unashamedly coopted from a movement which, despite being very generally defined, defines it radically differently. And that's not to say it's always a bad thing either. Sometimes it takes a title to help signal change and make an organization better which in the end accomplishes the goal of the movement.

And I agree, I don't think we ever left that square and we never will. But if prepending "dev" to "ops" wasn't at least somewhat effective in getting something out of people in decision making positions it wouldn't be tacked on to job titles and team names left and right. So at least some people think the marketing terms in a job title are a meaningful shortcut even if smart people like you know better.