I’ve said before that “DevOps engineer” is a bit of an oxymoron. I want to explore this idea a bit, by looking at what “DevOps engineers” do.

When I do a job search for “DevOps engineer” on LinkedIn, here are some of the commonly required skills and experience:

• CI/CD pipelines
• Build automation
• Cloud providers (AWS, Google, Azure)
• Configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc)
• Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

When we plot these skills and activities against the DevOps lifecycle, we see something like this:

Practically everything a DevOps engineer does falls on the “Operations” side of the chart. This is why I think it’s much more accurate and honest to call this role simply “Operations Engineer.”

Now some of you may be thinking that “DevOps Engineer” is a specific type of Operations Engineer; one who works according to DevOps principles. But then wouldn’t we also have DevOps Developers?

In my view, “DevOps” belongs in the job description (along with things like “Agile”, “Scrum”, “Kanban”, “Remote-first”, and other ways of working), not in the job title.