[hotpotamus]

I'm the ops guy on a small dev team, and I run a sort of hybrid setup for prod that does involve me working on hardware in a colo sometimes, though fairly rarely (I'd love to spend about half my time hauling servers around and cabling stuff so that I'm not stuck at a desk all day, but that's not the way it is).

The whole point of my job is to enable developers to deliver code that provides customers value. On that level I actually embrace the common "condescensions" (so-to-speak) that I'm tech support for developers or a YAML wrangler.

I actually had an experience recently where a developer asked to make some changes to our infrastructure. I pretty much developed our container orchestration system (based on Docker Swarm rather than Kubernetes - a choice our architect made that I've come to appreciate), so I walked him through how my IaC works, told him what he needed to change and then reviewed his pull request and applied the changes. I guess we're on a devops journey now if I want to put it in corpo-tech speak.

Anyway, I suppose a lot of IT departments/guys get lost in creating their "perfect" unassailable systems and forget that the big picture is that the job is to enable customers; most directly are likely to be the developers or other internal employees, but ultimately the end customer who's handing you money to solve their problems.