This we can agree on.
> Personally, I'm not impressed at all with most software made in an Ops environment. I think it usually sucks and that sucky quality,
Not sure what is an ops environment although I'll agree with the general statement that most software I see sucks and is of sucky quality, but I think that relates back to your first point.
> In fact, this is how Ops used to work. You'd use humans to oil the machinery of the basic automation you put in place, and they were damn good at keeping uptime high and catching problems nobody thought of in their automation. Now people just automate and pray, it seems, and then play catch-up indefinitely, or waste time redesigning.
I'm not proposing that the rise of devops precludes the need for people specialized in it's use and implications. Instead that sysadmin is essentially becoming a branch of software engineering with the rise of devops. When setting up a system IS writing code, why is the "software engineer" different from the "sysadmin"?