As well as being inflammatory and belittling, his reasoning in this area also fails to question the status quo, and realise that maybe a form DevOps is a path t

As well as being inflammatory and belittling, his reasoning in this area also fails to question the status quo, and realise that maybe a form DevOps is a path to a better outcome. It is the case, that in many organisations, the roles down the bottom of his totem pole are less skilled than the top. There are point-and-click DBAs and Server Admins and release managers who don't have the base skills to write software. But they're rarely very good at the roles they're doing. I have a bunch of issues with what a lot of organisations do under the banner of "DevOps", but part of what it is trying to do is bring engineering solutions to those layers "down the totem pole". I want DBAs that invest in reliable, repeatable, automated processes. And that means I want them to be able to build working software. And similarly with the other roles he mentions. Now, generally speaking, you'll get more useful work from a system admin who just follows the procedure they were given, than you will for a developer who does likewise. But, if you can do it, you will get plenty of value from hiring people with some engineering skills/training into all those roles. The counter examples are the system admin who takes 2 weeks to setup a new server because it's all done by hand every time. Or the release team who buys fancy "automation software" to automate a broken process because they don't understand the process well enough to build a working solution. Or the operations team that just reboots the server when it's broken because they don't have access to people with skills to diagnose the problem. Or the QA team that builds automated testing tools that are completely unmaintainable because no one in the team has a background in software engineering. The totem pole hurts because - it (often) treats the people at the bottom quite poorly. - as a consequence it discourages good people from taking roles "at the bottom". - which leads those teams to produce far-from-optimal solutions. Not (necessarily) for lack of effort, just because they don't have the skills + training to build the optimal solutions. (Obviously, as your Mozilla example shows, some organisations manage to escape that trap) If you need to hire less qualified/skilled people, then you're probably better off putting them into the roles that are "at the bottom" of this supposed totem pole, but if you can fill all the roles with solid engineers then you'll reap rewards from it.