Call it what you will, 'DevOps' is just what you'd expect a good sysadmin to do in a sufficiently large org. That there is on going friction between developers and sysadmin ("it works on my box" is a valid excuse?) is perhaps a larger sign of the culture and people involved.
For instance: I wanted to do a few projects in Rails. I made sure that my admins had links, guides, and all the info they needed when I started the project. By the time I was ready to launch, they'd already had Ruby, Passenger, and all my dependent gems installed. Deploy was a breeze.
Later, a different coworker did a project in Django, but didn't breathe a word to our sysadmins. When he and the client agreed that it was launch time, our admins were scrambling to figure out what version of Python we needed, how to set up the environment, and what the deployment best practices were. Everyone was angry and the deploy was late, but the developer didn't see any consequences.
Kills me.
In the old-world way of things, the Architects of the system would take all of that into account - the sysadmins were just there to keep the systems up and running and install the software per the developers instructions.
What's new, or seemingly new, because of the rapid advance of technology and the internet in general, is the rapid develop/deploy cycle, which ends up requiring a much tighter coupling between development and operations... the two almost blend together. The lines are getting fuzzy.
I work in a large organization (5000+ employees) as a unix/linux sysadmin. You have to automate deployment, monitoring, configuration management because there just isn't time to do anything else. We have a group (about 4) out of 30+ that have an overall view of what you might call devops. The rest specilize in development or sysadmins. We meet once a week and review all progress on the dev/ops issues.
I like the term OpSec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_security) someone who looks after Systems/Security ;) Since a good system admin should also know a great deal about security. Maybe Dev/Op/Sec.. haha, but really ;)
p.s. I found that job posting to be full of PR fluff. It would be nice to see job posting actually post what their looking for in a distilled form.
I just think people need to specialize in their field (+ a general knowledge of how the overall systems works).
Almost how a carpenter, plumber, and electrician each specialize but probably have a general idea how everything works. Do you really want a plumber building the foundation of your house? Just seems a little silly to me. Each domain is so large that I would rather have deep expert knowledge in a area than a general handyman who might cut corners or waste time with solutions he doesn't know about.
This is called "second line support".
I'm sad that people are not taking the time to learn exactly what DevOps means and thusly commandeering the name for whatever they think they need.
Now I know that "DevOps" means "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it". Whenever you come across something in IT you think is new, take the time to find out if mainframe shops were doing it in the 1970s... Back then sysadmins wrote assembly language to automate systems tasks and it was just an everyday part of the job!
Obviously the real world is different. New code is deployed that has bugs, there are unpredicted events, there are complex failure scenarios that are difficult to automate etc.
A DevOps engineer may write automation software in conjunction with developers to automate the operational aspects of business logic. Thus, it's a partnership between the DevOps engineer whose metrics are driven by availability/reliability/scalability/security and the developer who is trying to attain some business objective.