This was a totally misguided re-branding of the field. It attracted bureaucratic personalities and classist managerial types, and utterly destroyed the field.
Like you, I couch my job description: I'm a "Systems Software Developer, I develop software systems" .. because its true, thats what I do, even if its a majority of the time working on embedded projects.
And if someone then responds with "ooh, so you're in IT", I immediately go to another corner of the party and avoid them like the intolerable bores they are ..
No need to be arrogant towards people outside the field. My grandma doesn't know the difference between the random IT guy that updates your Windows printer driver and a Linux kernel dev, but I'd still not call her an "intolerable bore".
It isn’t a problem for my ego to do that, and it’s something that’s both relatable and typically stops the conversation from revealing anymore about my work (not that there’s really anything to hide, I just enjoy my privacy and no, I don’t want to meet your “computer genius” nephew or fix your phone).
If I’m in a clearly technical group, I’ll go into more detail. I don’t identify myself with the DevOps term though, or sysadmin, or developer. I don’t clearly fit into any of the -currently assumed- definitions of those.
I always default to "I work in IT". If that person is in the space I might go into specifics; but even then majority can't relate or understand the role i spend my days working in.
It also has the benefit of coming across as more blue collar and I catch less grief, as the disdaine for tech workers continues to grow.
In social situations, I usually just say "I'm into computers". Most people who ask what I do don't really care, they're just engaging in ritualistic small talk anyway. If someone does care, they'll ask clarifying questions.
Hard to convince management that a dedicated onsite IT would be required - especially when they think it is your job already.
Gotta appreciate if you're working in the former. Drawback is you can't BS your way through issues. Everybody above me in the chain (which is like 4 people) could write a quicksort blindly. If anybody tries any BS they don't have their job much longer.
Well, nobody forces you to work for a company with managers like that. I personally wouldn't.
That's kind of like saying, even slaves have a choice. Death being the option available to all.
Drawing a comparison to slavery is quite shocking, tbh.
A good example is how software releases work. Where I worked 15 years ago, releases were something we could afford to do about four times a year, at night, on the weekends, doing the rollout by logging onto machines and starting them back up, babysitting the rollout. Because rollbacks were catastrophic, an insane amount of time went into QA, so the time between a code change and a release could be easily multiple months. Now I'm at a place where releases are done every day of the week. Rollout steps are largely automated. Rollbacks are mostly drama free. Risk is mitigated through automated canarying (and automated testing before that).
And certainly the business has successfully gotten rid of paying people to log in to servers on a Saturday night to perform a release (which frankly not a lot of people are into in the first place, so everyone wins).