My Google news feed recently popped up an article by Don MacVittie over on DevOps.com, entitled Yes, You’re Doing DevOps.

I must say, despite a few valid points in the article (more on that in a moment), I’m quite disappointed to see DevOps purveying such a skewed interpretation of “DevOps.”

Let me break it down.

The main thesis of the article is: Many devs use deployment tools, and this means they’re doing DevOps whether they recognize it or not. As evidence, MacVittie points to the recent StackOverflow 2021 Developer Survey:

Docker, Kubernetes and similar tools make up more of the responses than can be accounted for by people with “DevOps” in their title.

What? DevOps in the job title? Although opinions are mixed, most people serious about DevOps agree that this term does not belong in a job title. Even other DevOps.com authors make this case in in various ways(1, 2). But whether “DevOps” belongs in a title or not is somewhat beside the point if our goal is analytics: The simple fact that a significant portion of the industry believes it does not belong in a title should be enough not to use this as a meaningful metric.

Second, MacVittie is looking at the use of tools as a proxy for “doing DevOps.” If there’s one thing that unites even those on opposing sides of the job title debate, it’s that DevOps is not a set of tools.

So with these two (very serious) caveats out of the way, let me address the one point where I (partly) agree with the author:

If your title is developer, and you’re using deployment tools on a regular basis, go ahead and call yourself DevOps.

This is a valid point, although only to a point.

DevOps is often said to be a mindset. I like to make this more concrete by saying DevOps is simply cooperation. If Dev and Ops aren’t cooperating toward a common goal, you’re not doing DevOps. Put another way, if there’s a hand-off between Dev and Ops, you’re not doing DevOps.

In that sense, any developer using deployment tools is doing DevOps, since there’s no hand-off taking place.

However, that does not mean that the team is doing DevOps. Just because I know how to write a Dockerfile to test my React frontend doesn’t mean there’s not a hand-off to get my finalized feature in front of customers.

That said, as an individual developer, if you’re looking to move into a more Operations-focused role, the best thing you can do is to start learning some deployment tools (like Docker). In this sense, the article is aboslutely correct. Regardless of whether your team is doing DevOps, as long as you are doing Development and Operations, in my view, you can legitimately put “DevOps” experience on your résumé and LinkedIn profile.