If you’ve used the term “DevOps” as a job title, you may have been making a big mistake. It sounds innocuous: After all, isn’t DevOps something that you do? If you’re a marketer, hiring manager or non-engineer at your company, it might seem like it.
But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s actually a philosophy and set of practices that guides how your engineering and IT teams work. And using the term improperly doesn’t always sit well with tech teams, even if they have “DevOps Engineer” on their LinkedIn profile.
Using the term improperly can cause many problems. It may create additional silos in your organization, or may negatively impact how teams collaborate and get things done—limiting the effectiveness and accountability of DevOps work.
To counteract misinterpretations of what DevOps is and what it means, it helps to know why it matters and where the idea came from.