I used to repeat this statement, but a few years of the current pattern, I disagree.<p>(I'm going to generalize for UNIX systems, apologies in advance)<p>Your traditional systems engineers are well versed in the ways of UNIX, but that does not automatically qualify them to wear the DevOps hat.<p>And vice versa. Systems and DevOps are two different sides of the house.<p>There is an entire tooling set that someone with the DevOps attribute needs to be aware of (CI/CD, tools that enable code review, etc), how they tie into the tools that the developers use, and how to troubleshoot when these things break down.<p>You, Systems Engineer, will be called when someone can't run "npm install" and an ERRNO message scrolls down the screen. While it could be something as innocent as a missing header file from an external dependency, it's still on you to rapidly troubleshoot and resolve.<p>You also need someone with UNIX and networking infrastructure chops. Someone who is familiar with a how to generate and read a packet capture, or maybe even use strace.<p>You, DevOps, will be asked why does it take forever-and-a-half to run 'ls' in a directory containing 10,000 files. Scratch that, you will asked to make it faster.<p>It's unreasonable to ask either of these folks to stretch and cover the other role, it results in a lot of resentment in how they're expected to do "two jobs" as well as complaints from developers that the DevOps/Systems Engineer's priorities and timelines don't line up with their own.<p>Worse, you'll see abominations (a relative viewpoint) because everyone knows their tools the best. To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.<p>I've seen automated DNS failover triggered via Jenkins, and I've seen automated code deployment triggered via cron on a 5 minute schedule.<p>DevOps is more than automation, it's about enabling developers to rapidly iterate in a sensible way that doesn't cause too much wake around a growing startup, an already functioning business, or a fast moving behemoth.<p>It's about enabling operations to rapidly provision new applications, monitor existing applications, properly perform capacity planning, and create repeatable infrastructure ...repeatedly.<p>And it's about both developers and operations coming together to onboard new employees into the environment in a short timeframe, so they can become productive.<p>This is all not to say that DevOps and traditional Systems Engineers + Network Engineers should live on different teams. Ideally, they're all on the same team, with different roles, and plenty of communication and cross-training.