[RichardCA]

Being a "Build-Release Engineer", essentially the sysadmin of the development tool chain, has existed since at least the 90's.

But the roots can be traced to the 70's (the PDP-11 had the compile-link process).

If you were really smart and could program in Assembler they called you a "Systems Programmer".

In the 80's, the PC revolution fostered debates over how much centralized control IT should have.

There was a long-standing debate in computing as to where the software should live (that is on a server or at the client level).

This debate was settled when Google invested heavily in making the browser a powerful and stable platform (think about Javascript in the 90's vs. today).

So the modern situation is server=cloud and client=browser. This creates a demand for people who understand how software is built/deployed/maintained in this environment.

So we slap the Devops label on it and pretend we understand what's going on.

But it's really a debate about how long the current status quo will last before it's subsumed by something else.