Really? You put a dozen people on the same _project_? I find it hard to believe that your project is so unique that A) requires 12 devs and B) is also deployable by all 12 of them (without relying on automation) in a way that doesn't throw off any of the other 12.

I don't know what you mean by "relying on automation" or "throwing off the other 12".

Deployment is mostly-automated - put a note in our chat channel topic that you're deploying (or queue if someone else is already deploying), push a button to do a release and deploy as staging (and a small smoke test), do any manual testing (or investigation of logs etc. if something goes wrong), push another button to flip that deploy to be prod.

Any of the 12 devs can do this (and does, we each deploy our own features/stories), any of the 12 devs can make changes to the deployment scripting just like with any other code area (some will be more or less familiar with them, but that's true of any area of the codebase). Nothing unique about it, quite the opposite.

If your deployment is automated, your developers aren't doing the deployment, the machine is, and the argument is moot.

Developers automate things, that's their whole job. The point is that we don't have people in dedicated ops/sysadmin roles, and are better for it.

I believe we are violently agreeing at this point.