"Full-stack" is a skillset for founders/first employees and hack-of-all-trades SREs. Later on in a now enterprise shop, deployments and development gets formal

"Full-stack" is a skillset for founders/first employees and hack-of-all-trades SREs. Later on in a now enterprise shop, deployments and development gets formalized, so it's crucial to have people/service providers whom know the nitty-gritty of the stack components really well... but it would be a distraction to expect a senior Postgres DBA to know client-side JavaScript. The overlap on the interface between sysadmining and development is deployment, where TwelveFactors-like shops can excel and reduce dev-ops turf wars. DevOps is about working together to make the overall service better; not shifting responsibilities around, getting people to take on more hats or renaming sysadmins. Disclaimer: I've been a (in no particular order): industrial embedded developer, sysadmin, engineering manager, founder, security researcher, consultant and SRE.