[burntoutfire]

Currently, somehow people who can wrap their heads around the "modern devops practices" command the highest wages, not the lowest.

In my opinion, the promises of devops and other automation are largely overblown, and these concepts are just replacing one set of problems with another - at least in software development. In hosting/provisioning, I agree that cloud was a game changer and for example renting a cluster of DynamoDB is massively simpler than running your own Cassandra.