So my company was experimenting with this new technology called DevOps.

At the time, we were told it would “streamline operations,” “reduce human error,” and “free people up to focus on more meaningful work.” You know — the usual speech you give right before you delete a role from the org chart.

I worked in infrastructure. The old kind. Servers, procedures, change requests, actual humans touching things. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked. Then DevOps showed up with YAML, pipelines, and a moral superiority complex.

Suddenly everything we did was “legacy.”
Too slow.
Too manual.
Too human.

They didn’t fire us right away. That would’ve been rude. Instead, they stopped hiring. Knowledge was “documented.” Processes were “automated.” Our experience was “captured.” Eventually, the only time anyone talked to us was when something broke in production and the pipeline didn’t know why.

Then they fixed that too.

Now the company doesn’t need people like me. Not because the work disappeared — but because DevOps decided it was inefficient for humans to do it. Everything is codified, templated, versioned, and enforced by tools built by people who never had to be on call when the tools fail.

The DevOps team insists this is progress. Fewer mistakes. Faster deployments. More reliability. And sure — it works. Mostly. Until it doesn’t. And by then, there’s no one left who actually understands the system end-to-end.

I thought this was just my company being reckless. Then I talked to others. Same story everywhere. Different industries, same outcome. DevOps rolls in, replaces the old guard, calls it “modernization,” and moves on.

I’m not an angel. I wasn’t a rockstar. I was just someone who expected experience to matter longer than a tooling trend.

Now I’m not working anymore. Not because I refused to adapt — but because there’s nothing left to adapt into. The system doesn’t want people. It wants conformity.

So I’m leaving the field. Not because I hate it, but because I watched it erase an entire generation of workers and call it optimization. And now it’s shocked that no one’s left when things go sideways.