I have a confession.
I’ve misunderstood the meaning of DevOps for most of my career.
To be honest, it’s how I’ve managed to survive for so long in the world of software development.
I used to believe DevOps was about being both a Developer and Ops engineer. I followed what the industry was saying without question. But over time, as I worked alongside some truly brilliant people, I realized that the real magic of DevOps is something else.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a few DevOps engineers who completely reshaped my understanding. They weren’t just people who bridged the gap between Dev and Ops. They were problem solvers. Collaborators. And sometimes, geniuses.
One helped a legal team deploy directly to production without blinking an eye.
Another automated every aspect of our operations to the point that we forgot what manual meant.
The last one made me question everything I thought I knew about “getting things done.”
From each of these people, I took a little something to sharpen my own approach to DevOps.
I’ve been lucky to learn from them.
But you don’t need to get lucky like I did. I’m going to share three lessons I learned from the smartest DevOps engineers I’ve had the privilege to work with.
You’re Doing DevOps Wrong
Before I started working with true DevOps professionals, I had a completely wrong understanding of what it was. Like most people, I thought DevOps meant being part developer and part ops, like some Frankenstein role. That’s what everyone said it was, right?
Wrong.
These rockstar engineers showed me that DevOps is about collaboration — not trying to wear two hats. It’s about bringing people together to deliver software faster and more predictably. If that means sitting down with the Ops guy to figure out why a call is slow, or convincing the legal team to push the button on a release pipeline, that is DevOps.
If you’ve been sold the idea that DevOps is about being a jack-of-all-trades, stop. It’s not. It’s about working smarter, not harder.
Lesson 1: DevOps is Collaboration, Not Chaos
The smartest DevOps engineer I worked with once told me, “It’s not about knowing everything — it’s about knowing how to work with everyone.” And that stuck with me.
This isn’t about throwing developers and ops engineers into the same role and hoping they figure it out. It’s about creating processes where communication is streamlined and problems are solved together. Think less “do everything yourself” and more “get the right people in the room to get things done faster.”
You don’t have to be an expert in every tool or technology. But you do need to be good at collaborating with people who are. The sooner you figure that out, the better.
Lesson 2: Learn the Tools, But Don’t Get Stuck in Them
One of the smartest engineers I worked with refused to pair program with me until I learned the keyboard shortcuts for my editor. It seemed trivial at the time, but he had a point — if you don’t know how to use your tools, you’ll never be efficient.
He was the type of engineer who wrote tests for everything, built automation for anything repetitive, and still had time to learn something new every week. He didn’t just learn the tools; he mastered them and used them to free up time for bigger problems.
He taught me that DevOps isn’t about what tools you use, but about how well you use them to drive automation and reduce manual work. Testing, logging, monitoring, automating — all of it serves one purpose: making software delivery smoother and faster.
Lesson 3: It’s Not About Tech, It’s About the Business
Finally, I worked with a DevOps engineer who threw out all the tech buzzwords I was so proud of. When I started babbling about how a new framework would improve performance or a certain tool would streamline our pipeline, he stopped me.
“How does this help the business?” he asked.
I didn’t have a good answer.
Because DevOps isn’t about cramming the latest tools into your stack for the sake of it. It’s about aligning with business goals. The smartest engineers understand that DevOps exists to support the company’s objectives, not just to play with cool tech. If what you’re doing doesn’t make the business run smoother, faster, or more efficiently, then it’s just noise.
