While I largely agree with that, I think it’s arguable that there are a set of technologies that enable that style of working, and that you can call an engineer that specializing in supporting those tools a devops engineer, and a team that supports them a devops team.
Having devops teams and engineers isn’t the same as practicing devops, but once you scale up your org, you’re going to end up with them, anyway.
For example, someone who is good with ci/cd pipelines, infra as code and just generally in automation and observability, as opposed to someone who is strong with linux internals or JavaScript
You can tear down silos all you want, but everybody can’t know everything and people will always specialize.
There's a big difference between people specializing and teams specializing. In every organization I've seen, when you take all of the individual specialists with the same skillset, put them on a team consisting of them (and only them), it ends up being an organizational disaster.
The organizational question is whether the ops folks are (physically/organizationally) colocated with developers on dev teams, or colocated with themselves on an overarching ops team.
Having devops teams and engineers isn’t the same as practicing devops, but once you scale up your org, you’re going to end up with them, anyway.
For example, someone who is good with ci/cd pipelines, infra as code and just generally in automation and observability, as opposed to someone who is strong with linux internals or JavaScript
You can tear down silos all you want, but everybody can’t know everything and people will always specialize.