The 2021 State of DevOps Report spends a couple of pages talking about DevOps as a job or team title (see pages 12-13). And while the authors tend to agree with me (that DevOps does not belong in a job/team title), they make one particularly interesting point:

The role that a “DevOps team” plays can vary widely, including:

• A team with end-to-end product responsibilities (doing “Dev” and “Ops” together).
• A team with responsibilities for supporting Dev teams with a combination of release automation, deployment pipelines, and developer tooling.
• A team that builds the awkward things that application developers don’t want or need to care about: infrastructure, container fabrics, monitoring, and metrics.
• A team responsible for encouraging and enabling DevOps practices across an organization.

In other words, “DevOps team” (and by exentsion, “DevOps Engineer”) is too ambiguous to be meaningful.

The report goes on to say:

In our experience, organizations that have less ambiguous team names, with more clearly defined responsibilities, are far more likely to have a higher performing IT function.

This makes intiutive sense, too. Which team would you expect to score hire in a football match, a team described as “Sports Team” or one described as “Football Team”?