For me, the biggest problem with framing operations as if it were a different kind of dev is that it’s an attempt to kind of trick the business side into not believing we’re just overhead and dead weight. We do this a lot. I’m going to coin something here: “terminology engineering” is when we, the tech world, decide that it’s too complicated to explain why something is valuable so we just rename it to sound like it’s more valuable. We’re doing it again right now with “DevSecOps”, because we’ve convinced the business folks that they need “DevOps” (even though they don’t know what it is) but they still think security is just an expense. What these term shifts do, though, is convince them—as you say—that there is “bad tech work” and “good tech work” and that before they must have been using the bad stuff with the old term so if we just fire everyone using the old term and then rehire people under the new term everything will get better and cheaper. This is getting long for a comment, maybe I should write this up somewhere.