Yeah, that might be a more accurate title at this point.

Part of the reason that the name DevOps was chosen almost 10 years ago when it was started was to help signal to the wider org the cultural shift we were undertaking, and that the expectation was going to be for devs to own their systems all the way through production.

At this point, we would probably change the name, but the team is quite attached to the name after 10 years. We actually did try to rename the team, but everyone still called it the devops team and we gave up on the change.

Agreed - this idea is often cited by fans of the book 'Team Topologies'. Its important here to distinguish between the idea of _an_ internal platform team and a _platform engineering_ team. A platform team is any team which provides services to internal clients - one such team would be the one (or ones) supporting whatever platforms-as-a-service are being used to deploy software to production.

Or infrastructure team, or systems administrator, perhaps sysadmin for short ;)

In the places I've been, a sysadmin has been someone who operates someone else's product -- not a person operating the systems developers use to operate their own product.

This is my observation as well. Sysadmins writes scripts or small programs for automation but its mostly using those tools for the operation of larger systems developed elsewhere (including other internal depts)

A sysadmin wouldn’t write payment code.

A sysadmin would write the tooling to ensure the payment code could work (failover databases, redundancies) and put safeguards in place so that it does not get traffic that is not intended for it.

Sysadmins used to write the code that touched thousands of machines at once, developers used to write the more complex code which were the bread and butter of the company.

But where I’ve worked, it was never a silo. Just a different mindset, and everyone worked together to do the best they can. That was before “DevOps”.

> sysadmin would write the tooling to ensure the payment code could work

Uhh if by tooling you mean a bash script to deploy ssh keys to prevent team A from accessing a machine owned by team B.

You really have no idea what you're saying.

Dijit is completely correct.

A junior sysadmin executes checklists, writes simple scripts, reads logs, and solves common problems, all while learning the complex supersystem of their workplace. They learn configuration of systems in use and how infrastructure is arranged and commonly changed.

A sysadmin helps to create checklists, writes more complex code to work in an automation system, and generally solves problems with non-obvious causes and/or remedies. They know all the routine events in their workplace, and add to documentation. They build, configure, test and recommend new tools and solutions to users, devs and the rest of the ops staff.

A senior sysadmin works on policy, debugs automation, solves complex interactions, and has an excellent understanding of complex systems and networks, not just at their workplace but in interactions and hypothetical interactions with the Internet at large.

You've nailed it.

DevOps guys are senior sys admin in the cloud (and that last caveat isn't mandatory). People shit on sys admins all the time but the only real difference between senior sys admins and DevOps engineers is pay packet, tools and responsibility.