Comment by JohnMakin

I think the comment you are replying to is pointing out the terrible ramifications of just taking a random sysadmin team and expecting them to work in a full blown devops role. I too have seen similar situations play out, and in slight reverse - in their scenario the devops guys were calling all of the shots, ive also seen (and have lived) the opposite where devs call any and every shot on devops stuff and the devops team is treated as little more than glorified IT tech support but for devs (understandable how a business could come to a conclusion about why that makes sense, given how they perceive the sys admin -> devops progression). This sounds like it’s what you may want but it has its own sorts of problems - devs dont always know the right thing or what to ask for or what not to ask for. Really good devops guys are experts at guiding these conversations collaboratively.

I have known and worked with some really great former sys admins gone devops. I am working on mentoring one right now, but I have to be kind of insulting about it and be like “forget everything you knew before it probably won’t help now” which sucks because sys admins do form pretty decent understanding of OS’s, databases, networking, etc. however, when it comes to the code part and more importantly taking all of these concepts and applying them to reasoning about infrastructure code and complex systems is very hard for most people and you have to take a “im a total newb” mentality a lot of people dont seem easily capable of doing.