The problem is that lots of developers who have no interest in operations, and even most who do aren't that good at it. I've worked with perfectly capable devel

The problem is that lots of developers who have no interest in operations, and even most who do aren't that good at it. I've worked with perfectly capable developers who didn't really know what an IP address was beyond "numbers with some dots in them". Personally I view platform engineering (or SRE) as the best endpoint of the ops role and devops philosophy. A good platform engineer is a developer that knows OSes, networking and databases and can expose abstractions that meet the requirements of application developers, akin to how a good application developer knows their the business domain and can expose an interface that meets the requirements of users. Nowadays, the platform engineering is often done by AWS or Google and that's sufficient for many developers and smaller organisations, but many orgs will probably still need some people of various skillsets between what is exposed by the cloud and the business requirements. I mainly think traditional ops is just a dead end. If something happens often enough that you feel like you need to develop a runbook and hire someone to follow it, you should just be automating the fix or fixing the underlying problem. DevOps in the sense of applying a development philosophy to ops (i.e. automation and version control rather than paper runbooks) and applying an ops philosophy to development (i.e. writing stable systems that are robust in the event of failures) is still a valuable philosophy, but the word itself is meaningless now.