Maybe that depends on who's uttering the phrase and what it means to them. Some points in the space:
- "Devops" as a movement encompassing the ideas that developers should not be walled off from operational realities, and that software operations tasks should be encoded as repeatable, testable software (vs ad-hoc stuff a sysadmin does on a box somewhere).
- "Devops" as "oh look, we can hire less people and just get some 'devops' to do it all."
The way i have seen it used was more like the inverse of your first example, where one go from encoded and tested sysadmin tasks to "lets throw into production any newfangled thing the devs (monkeys hammering keyboards, more like it) wants to use".
Devops can definitely be used as a very expensive bandaid around poor engineering practices.
But there's more to it... sometimes the engineering work it takes to prevent something from crashing is much less than just monitoring and restarting when failures are detected. Maybe "failure engineering" is a good term for a lot of the value Devops techniques can bring to a team?
When implementing a failure-tolerant system, one has to remember that "crash" can often be parlayed into "exploit" or at least "denial of service", and thus not become too tolerant of failure.
But isn't that what all systems engineering is all about? Feedback loops with resiliency. Why is it that the software folks think they have discovered something new?
DevOps is an integral part of Continuous Deployment. I am not sure why methods used to make deployment of software more frequent and less error prone should raise anyone's hackles. I guess it is not understanding what DevOps is and what it is trying to achieve.
You pretty much answered yourself right there in your comment. See how you capitalize "Continous Deployment" and "DevOps"? That's because they're recently invented feel-good buzzwords.
That's the one. That's basically short hand for "you don't need to do anything really well, you just need to do everything barely good enough to ship it now".
The sad bit is that many full-stack developers are actually better that specialized developers in respective skills. (unless of course they are JS/Node.js types)
Which really means "OUR stack developer, being a subset of the full-stack in our particular narrow domain, going as high as we go, and as low as we go".
I agree and that's exactly what job adverts should say. Spell out the stack and the amount of experience required. None of the nonsense with vague phrases like "full-stack developer".
