> If your sysadmins don't have the technical skills to diagnose these problems, they are incompetent and must be replaced.

The actual result of this is that the sysadmins are not replaced, and the application developers end up in an emergency conference call at 3am to tell the sysadmins which buttons to click on the production environment, since they’re not allowed access themselves.

I spent several years at a large multinational cloud provider that gave developers and QA access to production systems and customer PII. That all changed after the company was bought by SAP and operations were integrated. I am amazed that engineers think this is acceptable. It is bad business practice, compromises security, and illegal in some jurisdictions.

If developers aren’t exposed to the deficiencies in their systems, they have no incentive to reduce SRE pages and triage. Build resilient code with quality documentation and you don’t have to attend a 3am conf call.

DevOps is not a role or role segregation, it’s about aligning incentives and outcomes across functions in an org (hopefully through collaboration, tooling, and knowledge transfer).

The caveat is that if your org is fundamentally broken, none of the above applies or works and it’s all lipstick on a pig.