I agree, in general, it's a relatively thankless job, where you are constantly cleaning up after other people's messes. Many developers don't think how their d

I agree, in general, it's a relatively thankless job, where you are constantly cleaning up after other people's messes. Many developers don't think how their decisions impact downstream processes, deployment, or operations. You get to fix build and deployment errors all the time, from either your own problems, hardware problems, upstream problems, or other developers on your team. Work is thrown over the fence all the time at you, with no warning. I don't think there's much need to come up with your own abstractions, and those that do like to write a lot of devops code seem to dig themselves into a hole. Simplicity is key. It's a lot like development, in all these ways. It's just even more annoying, since people call you when it stops working, rather than just waiting until tomorrow to barge into your office. It's not just politics that keep people from being responsible for their own messes. It's honestly about ability. Those who can't solve hard problems that pop up randomly are the ones who get to write features, leaving head-scratching bugs to those who have the ability to fix them. But then again, I might just be feeling jaded today. I'd consider myself both sides of Dev and Ops, and been called everything in between (usually when they try to convince me to take on something).