Why Developers Hate Ops: Is DevOps Dead and Is Platform Engineering the Future?

The slogan “who builds, who runs” puts pressure on developers, while operations teams also face challenges, prompting the question of whether the global DevOps wave will fade.

According to journalist Scott Carey, many developers claim they are "tired of DevOps". This article compiles his observations, noting that the views expressed are the author’s own and not those of InfoQ.

Emily Freeman, community lead at Amazon Cloud and author of *DevOps For Dummies*, admitted on Twitter that most developers do not want to handle operations. Hundreds of developers echoed this sentiment, with comments such as “I’m a developer, I don’t want to deal with ops” and “I prefer focusing on specific programming skills rather than being a jack‑of‑all‑trades.”

Andrew Gracey of SUSE argues that developers and operations staff should collaborate while playing distinct roles, and James Brown of Ondat warns that overloading developers leads to inefficiency. Nick Durkin of Harness adds that people are realizing that electricians and plumbers are not the same job.

Responsibilities Have Ballooned

In the late 2000s, DevOps and agile methods rose with cloud computing, aiming to merge previously isolated development and deployment efforts for a "1+1>2" effect. Organizations that embraced this saw faster feedback loops and more frequent production releases. However, some misinterpreted DevOps as making developers solely responsible for operations, creating a unrealistic "full‑stack developer" ideal.

Developers report frustrations such as locked‑down machines that prevent installing software or using virtualization, and the increasing workload on operations teams as the number of developers grows.

Mathew Duggan notes that operations now not only maintain application availability, security, and compliance but also build and maintain delivery pipelines so developers can release code without direct ops involvement. This shift demands new skills in cloud engineering and infrastructure‑as‑code.

Tyler Jewell of Dell Technologies Capital warns that building long‑term, stable teams is challenging as system complexity and user feedback increase, making it hard to predict the impact of changes.

Is DevOps Dead?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), born at Google to address the growing pains DevOps sought to solve, now serves as a bridge between development and operations. Ben Treynor, Google’s VP of Engineering and SRE founder, says that requiring software engineers to design operational features essentially creates SRE roles.

Financial firms like Vanguard and Morgan Stanley find it difficult to balance development and operations during cloud‑native transitions, using SRE as a buffer to maintain development speed while ensuring operational stability.

Developers appreciate SRE teams for building tools and maintaining infrastructure, allowing them to focus on deployment without worrying about the underlying mechanics. Yet, critics like Trevor Brosnan caution that SRE can be misread as a sweeping overhaul of operations teams.

Is Platform Engineering the Future?

Many companies are now creating internal developer platforms or platform engineering groups to provide developers with the necessary APIs, tools, and services while shielding them from direct infrastructure concerns. These platforms are managed by dedicated expert teams.

Sid Palas tweets that "DevOps is dead, platform engineering is the future," arguing that developers don’t want to deal with infrastructure, yet enterprises need to control it. Brandon Byars of Thoughtworks adds that platform engineering reduces friction in development processes while granting developers flexibility.

To sustain DevOps principles in this new era, organizations must understand how to balance development and operations, especially as cloud‑native system complexity continues to rise.