Job specs for DevOps engineer jobs often mention a vast variety of duties and responsibilities. Are they hiring for a single role or a whole team?

Roles having _DevOps _in their title hardly share the same meaning. They often have something in common, though. They try to cover for what traditionally would have been the specialization of different professionals.

Don’t get me wrong: cross-functional expertise is definitely important. But I don’t think DevOps means replacing a multitude of specialization with a single role. Different specializations like operations, security, testing, development, product Management, and so on, are vast and require specific knowledge.

This is why I think the key differentiator of successful DevOps organizations is that they enable effective collaboration. They have as their clear North Star the goal of delivering value to the end user.

Overall, I don’t think we should be talking about a DevOpsengineer, but rather about DevOps culture in organizations.

But let’s take a step back first.

What does DevOps mean, really?

I tweeted my own definition of DevOps some time ago.

“DevOps is a highly condensed way of referring to the combination of practices that aim at shortening the software development life-cycle, increase the feedback opportunities and facilitate continuous improvement and experimentation.”

— Alessandro Diaferia (@alediaferia) July 4, 2020

DevOps organizations incentivize different specialties to collaborate.

The intrinsic existing tension between Dev, making changes to the

system, and Ops, wanting to keep the system stable, dissolves. The

greater good is now the value stream.

A stable system that delivers nothing is as useless as an unstable system that keeps offering new functionality.

Dev and Ops understand the importance of working together to maximize

this flow, to figure out which bets worked out and which ones didn’t.

Organizations that embrace the DevOps mindset can be more effective than the competition at experimenting with new functionality. They quickly

validate their assumptions, activating and deactivating functionality by flipping a switch on a dashboard.

Incidents become an opportunity for learning rather than a chance for blaming someone.

In general, DevOps organizations learn to adapt and evolve to any situation.

Overall, I think there shouldn’t be a single DevOps role, but rather a set of specific specialties collaborating effectively.

This ideal view of the terminology might sometimes clash with the reality of the job market. Companies willing to attract the best talent with the most current skills may end up advertising for roles that are counterproductive in the context of DevOps principles.

But let’s have a look at a few interesting job specs.

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