WTF does a 'devops engineer' do all day? I have worked with them for over three years now, but I honestly wonder how they can do this full-time.

they do the same thing that a scrum engineer would do

Like anything, the title is relatively meaningless and it depends entirely on the company.

The traditional meaning is someone who is responsible for deploying their code and maintaining it in its live environment as well as doing the dev work - but really, it can mean anything depending on who you ask.

@Hazarth or an mssql server engineer

Is it another situation of "if you don't know what they do, they do their job well"

@electrineer or they don't do all that much.

@electrineer yeah sounds good but just a bullshit.

Isn't it the DevOps job to fix merge conflicts, setup github/gitlab actions, CI/CD, test-build-deploy, essentially automate stuff?

Asking for a friend

If a company hires dedicated "devops" engineers then they're probably not doing devops.

@fruitfcker no, thats the developers job.

Devops is not a role, its a way of working where you don't keep developers and operations separated Usually this means that you have your sysadmins, dbas, etc work as part of the development team (or you'll have the developers take on those tasks for the software they've built), if you have dedicated devops engineers or even worse, a dedicated "devops team" you've basically failed to understand the point of devops.

@ItsNotMyFault Yeah one of my friend was working as devops engineer and do nothing.. Once in his entire one year he was assigned to make live a website on server. Woow DevOps Engineer

@ItsNotMyFault thanks. It's odd though. I see a lot of job posts of DevOps Engineers and the job description doesn't involve actual coding. To be honest, it really looks like sysadmin with a bit of coding.

@fruitfcker devs fix the conflicts.. at least I haven’t worked with any DevOps engineers that will touch the code base.

@fruitfcker not the merge conflicts. Of course every role varies but you do describe something that someone with a DevOps engineering role would be looking at, but also backups, metrics, alerting performance/resource optimallisation.
Often devops engineers also do normal development especially the part that hits infra. Sometimes they also do a lot of infra and security related things (updates, application firewall etc.)

@hjk101 so basically... Gilfoyle

Devops is usually the guy who can work on all levels of OSI model. He shall know to configure the routers and switches, and do the network automation as well. Sometimes he shall keep track on the states of the servers, and if some problems happened he is the first line support in the environment.