Everyone wants an engineer who can do everything competently, but few places are actually willing to compensate to recruit and keep the people who have those skills. Even worse, some of the places that can afford the right people - they have internal politics that prevent these people from being able to drive meaningful change once in the role. Good people will leave environments like that and they'll be left with people who are either under-utilized or who caused internal conflict in the first place.
Every executive loves to hear "ownership", "get rid of silos", "speed up release time", "repeatable deployments". They don't like hearing "increase salaries dramatically", "piss off some existing employees", and "hiring is going to be even harder".
So what happens instead? Middle-management types decide to train their existing teams to use tools that are associated with "DevOps", update some job titles, and tell the investors and executives they now have a DevOps team. The existing employees are now happy to learn new tools and feel appreciated, the migration to the new tools may or may not solve some old lingering pain points (while also introducing some new, un-predicted pain points that the new DevOps team will happily resolve and write RCAs about, allowing leadership to think that "dev culture" is taking hold).
The fact of the matter is, "doing it right" is very expensive and not necessarily going to save every company costs or increase their revenue in the long-run. Sometimes just using better tools and and adopting better processes is enough to see benefits, and that's ok. If running infrastructure is your company's core competency, then it makes sense to invest in extremely skilled people at all levels that touch infra. But those extremely skilled people are expensive, prone to turnover, and tend to be picky about where they work.
So I don't should shame companies and engineers for shallow adoption of DevOps tooling and imply they're subverting the DevOps "movement" or whatever. There is room for many roles under the DevOps umbrella, and just because some places aren't immediately restructuring everything, doesn't mean they aren't learning won't contribute back to the greater community at some point in the future.
I have been lurking HN for a couple of years, but this comment made me create an account. I am all too familiar with the problems you're stating here. It is quite frustrating, really. People like myself are hired to change the system, destroy silos - then, they (management, generally) see that we're talented at building infrastructure, or some other task that we do, and they throw us into a traditional sysadmin role, and are confused why they can't hold on to a DevOps/SRE/WhateverEngineer for very long. Then they tell their managers that they have/are doing DevOps because they had a guy build some CI/CD pipelines and build out servers, probably manually 1-by-1 because the tools for automating that aren't allowed and the "DevOps" guy doesn't have entitlements to automate it. Not that I'd know anything about that...
Everyone wants an engineer who can do everything competently, but few places are actually willing to compensate to recruit and keep the people who have those skills. Even worse, some of the places that can afford the right people - they have internal politics that prevent these people from being able to drive meaningful change once in the role. Good people will leave environments like that and they'll be left with people who are either under-utilized or who caused internal conflict in the first place.
Every executive loves to hear "ownership", "get rid of silos", "speed up release time", "repeatable deployments". They don't like hearing "increase salaries dramatically", "piss off some existing employees", and "hiring is going to be even harder".
So what happens instead? Middle-management types decide to train their existing teams to use tools that are associated with "DevOps", update some job titles, and tell the investors and executives they now have a DevOps team. The existing employees are now happy to learn new tools and feel appreciated, the migration to the new tools may or may not solve some old lingering pain points (while also introducing some new, un-predicted pain points that the new DevOps team will happily resolve and write RCAs about, allowing leadership to think that "dev culture" is taking hold).
The fact of the matter is, "doing it right" is very expensive and not necessarily going to save every company costs or increase their revenue in the long-run. Sometimes just using better tools and and adopting better processes is enough to see benefits, and that's ok. If running infrastructure is your company's core competency, then it makes sense to invest in extremely skilled people at all levels that touch infra. But those extremely skilled people are expensive, prone to turnover, and tend to be picky about where they work.
So I don't should shame companies and engineers for shallow adoption of DevOps tooling and imply they're subverting the DevOps "movement" or whatever. There is room for many roles under the DevOps umbrella, and just because some places aren't immediately restructuring everything, doesn't mean they aren't learning won't contribute back to the greater community at some point in the future.