from what I've seen, the term 'devops' is generally used to pay a developer less than you would otherwise while getting more from them. I'm not sure how the math of that works out, but based on what I've seen, that's what happens.
My average "devops" engineer is paid the same as the senior-level engineers within my company.
Ditto. DevOps is charged out at the same comparative rate Sys Admin was 10 years a ago. Which makes sense - it's boring work and not as many people want to do it.
Boring is in the eye of the beholder. The biggest challenge I've found is that very few engineers have the depth to even attempt the job competently.
Most engineers simply don't have a meaningful understanding of the internals of large-scale environments.
>The bottom 60% ... left the industry
I wish. They are still here and still copy+pasting commands they don't understand. The entire linux world is still dominated by these people. The whole "howto" culture is still very much alive and kicking.
Instead, about 40% what was called 'sys admins' were pushed to become devops. The 'sys admin who knew cfengine' became a 'devops person who knew ansible'. Deploys and cloud APIs just became another thing to automate.
The bottom 60% - the shit ones who got paid 120,000GBP to copy paste commands they didn't understand from word documents into Solaris 8 boxes in 2010 because they couldn't actually automate anything - left the industry.