> The fact is that for many years, some "System Administrator" types did already think like "developers" and use similar tooling.
The funny thing is that it was the opposite for me. I became a DevOps Engineer because a lot of my work was being self-supported with my own infrastructure. I found that I had a knack for finding and putting together good systems to support my work. In many ways, I guess I was considered the quintessential DevOps person. In my QA role, I wound up being a developer who needed to put together infrastructure to support the needs of the QA group and to a lesser extent software engineers.
When this was recognized, I was moved into the sysadmin group as a founding member of a new team. That team grew and split out into its own group that specifically interfaced with both software engineers and infrastructure engineers. My team is not perfect, but it's been the best I could ask for. We've done amazing work transforming our engineering processes over the years, and software engineers are now more often part of the infrastructure bringup process than not. We've still got a ways to go, but we're getting there.
The funny thing is that it was the opposite for me. I became a DevOps Engineer because a lot of my work was being self-supported with my own infrastructure. I found that I had a knack for finding and putting together good systems to support my work. In many ways, I guess I was considered the quintessential DevOps person. In my QA role, I wound up being a developer who needed to put together infrastructure to support the needs of the QA group and to a lesser extent software engineers.
When this was recognized, I was moved into the sysadmin group as a founding member of a new team. That team grew and split out into its own group that specifically interfaced with both software engineers and infrastructure engineers. My team is not perfect, but it's been the best I could ask for. We've done amazing work transforming our engineering processes over the years, and software engineers are now more often part of the infrastructure bringup process than not. We've still got a ways to go, but we're getting there.