DevOps and the Blurring Lines - Asterisk Pound
How deployment, infrastructure, and reliability became part of the software engineer’s job — whether we wanted it or not.
This post is part of The Modern Software Engineer, a series on building software sustainably in a constantly changing industry.
DevOps and the Blurring Lines
There was a time when software engineers wrote code, handed it off, and moved on.
Operations handled deployment. Infrastructure lived somewhere else. Failures were someone else’s problem.
That separation doesn’t really exist anymore.
How We Got Here
As software systems grew more complex, the handoff model started to break down.
Problems emerged:
- deployments became fragile
- environments drifted
- bugs appeared only in production
- no one owned failures end-to-end
The feedback loop was too slow. The people writing the code weren’t the ones seeing it fail.
DevOps didn’t appear because it was trendy. It appeared because the old way stopped working.
DevOps Isn’t a Role — It’s a Response
Despite how it’s often treated, DevOps was never meant to be a job title.
It was a reaction to a problem:
- development and operations were too disconnected
- accountability was fragmented
- delivery was slow and risky
The idea was simple: the people who build software should be closer to how it runs.
Over time, that idea turned into:
- CI/CD pipelines
- infrastructure as code
- monitoring and observability
- automated testing and deployment
- cloud-native architectures
Not because it was fashionable — but because it was necessary.
The New Expectation
Today, most software engineers are expected to understand at least some of:
- how their code is deployed
- how it scales
- how it fails
- how it’s monitored
- how it’s rolled back
You may not manage servers. You may not write Terraform. But you’re expected to understand the system you’re contributing to.
The boundary moved.
The Cost of Ignoring Operations
When engineers don’t understand production systems, a few things happen:
- features are built without regard for reliability
- debugging becomes slow and painful
- outages become mysterious
- ownership becomes unclear
Eventually, teams compensate with:
- more process
- more meetings
- more handoffs
- more friction
None of which actually solve the root problem.
The Rise of Platform Thinking
In response, many organizations now invest in:
- platform teams
- internal tooling
- developer experience
- paved roads instead of rigid rules
The goal isn’t to turn every engineer into an ops expert.
It’s to:
- remove sharp edges
- standardize common workflows
- make the right thing the easy thing
This is where DevOps matured into platform engineering.
What This Means for Software Engineers
You don’t need to be a cloud expert.
But you do need to:
- understand how your code reaches production
- know what happens when it fails
- design with observability in mind
- respect operational constraints
The days of “it works on my machine” are long gone.
The Bigger Picture
This shift changed the profession in a fundamental way.
Software engineers are no longer just builders. They’re operators. Maintainers. System thinkers.
And that shift explains a lot of the stress people feel in modern development — the scope of responsibility is simply larger than it used to be.
Looking Ahead
Next, we’ll talk about the part of the industry that never stops moving:
The bleeding edge.
The place where hype, experimentation, and real innovation blur together — and where companies often struggle to tell the difference.