[legolin]

It seems that the main problem here was not DevOps but rather the culture in which he was asked to do his work. Creating a devops team whether "by fiat or by force" doesn't sound like a recipe for a good experience.

My experience is different: DevOps saves me many headaches by letting me easily deploy things for small clients. A larger company I work with uses Chef to manage their 40+ servers; the IT department doesn't touch these servers. Rather, 3 or 4 developers share in the work of writing cookbooks, adding instrumentation, deploying code and maintaining the servers. It would be handy to have a full-time guy as well (OP mentioned the amount of work needed to keep up with just your basic security patches) but we -- as developers -- love the access we have to our entire stack.

[jjmojojjmojo]

I don't want to take away from your point, but you touched on security - I mentioned it because it was a constant pain point for both myself and for our teams. Like operations, it's something you can be good at on a superficial level, and do OK for most things, but really getting it and being good at it takes experience and time.

I don't think it came through in my post, but having a security expert (or any specialist) in the mix can be a huge help in making the product better - I know this from personal experience - you just have to make sure they're integrated, challenged, and respected in the group.