I sort of agree but a good sysadmin was never idle on the inside. I'm seeing good devops people getting worked well beyond what I'd consider reasonable expectations i.e. "Oh, look, you can do everything! Here's everything!".

They're being perverted into a role having a full load of pure operations with shit for processes (and, often, systems) and an expectation that you have time to automate and shore up all the shit and technical debt accumulated since.

Can most good or even extraordinary developers simultaneously be elbow deep on a dozen unrelated products and actually get reasonable traction? I can barely keep one glass castle together, myself.

This is exactly my sentiment and why I moved away from SRE and back to SWE. I felt busy all the time doing development of tools and infrastructure while at the same time aggregating the role of operations.

Never having the time to properly finish a project that I was proud of delivering, turning those into services so we could leverage self-servicing was a dream that most of the time never happened, we were left with half-done systems requiring tons of manual intervention (lots of toil) while having to move fast to the next thing...

I think a lot of data engineers and transcoding folks would have similar reports. But you’re right; the problem with DevOps is the reach of their usefulness. If your whole company is built on code, your DevOps team will always be overworked and under appreciated.

Great sysadmins get fired unless they learn to pretend to look busy. They automate everything till they have nothing to do.

Logging is your friend here. You can spend days scrolling through logs, doing an occasional grep and making disapproving noises occasionally. Bonus points for developing some graphs for the next meeting.

My introduction to statistics was learned as a sysadmin, trying to show that I was doing 'stuff'.

Can you elaborate that?

Whats a “devops person” for you and what keeps them busy? And why cant they have systems that hum along self-healingly automated?

Most of the tools of the modern "devops person" are undergoing constant development themselves.

So, not only is there the responsibility of creating this self-healing automated infrastructure, but keeping tools and resume up-to-date, as well.