DevOps… or GTFO

DevOps isn’t a job title. It never was, and it never should have been. Yet every time you glance at a job board, you see “We’re hiring a DevOps Engineer!” plastered like some magical role that singlehandedly fixes organizational silos, speeds up deployments, and sprinkles CI/CD fairy dust on every pull request. Let’s set the record straight: DevOps is a philosophy—a cultural approach to how software gets built, tested, released, and operated—not a single person’s responsibility. Slapping “DevOps” onto someone’s business card and expecting miracles is naïve at best, and organizationally destructive at worst.

At its core, DevOps represents the continuous collaboration between developers, operations, QA, security, and anyone else with a stake in delivering software. It pushes us to break down the longstanding “us vs. them” dynamic between dev and ops. If you dump that mindset and embrace DevOps as a philosophy, you suddenly realize the entire team is responsible for writing stable code, deploying it with care, and ensuring it runs flawlessly in production. It’s not about one person; it’s about uniting everyone under the banner of shared responsibility, continuous feedback, and relentless improvement.

Labeling DevOps as a job title has created a bizarre scapegoat hero phenomenon: hire a “DevOps Engineer,” toss them all your pipeline woes, then shrug when they can’t magically fix every organizational dysfunction. Meanwhile, executives still treat dev and ops as separate kingdoms, expecting a single individual to tear down silos and unify processes. That’s not how real change happens. Instead, DevOps flourishes when leadership mandates cross-functional collaboration, invests in proper tooling and automation, and fosters a culture where knowledge flows freely among teams.

If DevOps were truly about hiring one “expert,” we’d have solved software delivery problems decades ago. But guess what? We’re still dealing with the same miscommunications, messy handoffs, and finger-pointing that plagued the industry for years. The difference DevOps brings is a mindset shift, a collective acceptance that building software end to end is everyone’s job. It demands empathy, transparency, and accountability from everyone on the team. Above all, DevOps calls for changing how we work, not just recruiting a lone “DevOps Engineer” and expecting a miracle. That’s why DevOps is a philosophy—one that challenges organizational habits, spurs cultural change, and refuses to let us hide behind job titles and siloed responsibilities.