Per my understanding (as one of the earliest contributors to Terraform and employees of HashiCorp) that indeed he was a developer with an interest in operations, not a sysadmin. Mostly consulting work for rails.

> (...) an Operations Engineer (...)

An operations engineer and a sysadmin are two entirely different roles.

A system administrator administers systems while an operations engineer dedicated their time writing code to automate processes.

You're conflating an IT Technician and a Sysadmin.

Sysadmins automate their work. Operations Engineer is just another title for sysadmin.

Systems Engineer is also another title for the same thing.

Platform Engineering (depending on where you are) is yet another variation.

If you're responsible for the operating system, monitoring, clustering, hardware etc; then you're firmly in "sysadmin" land.

This whole string of conversation is some of the most horrendous navel gazing I've had in my comments for a while.

Welcome to Hackernews.

Pedantry is requisite.

> Sysadmins automate their work.

So do janitors. What's your point?

> Operations Engineer is just another title for sysadmin.

It really isn't. That makes as much sense as claiming that DevOps is just a sysadmin that's also a developer.

Job titles are mostly meaningless when comparing across organizations (and often within organizations, when they are large enough.)

Many "operations engineers" are actually sysadmins. Many "devops" are really sysadmins also doing development.