What is DevOpps, anyway?

First of all, don't confuse this with DevOps, the popular ideology that drives small businesses to hire cloud experts and pay through their noses to AWS/Azure/GCP.

DevOpps means "developer opportunists" and is, in a nutshell, the community of the software developers that are the least likely to engage in communal activities. The term was coined by Erik Dietrich in his book "Developer Hegemony" - he gives the book away for free to those who join his community. But perhaps you're better off just reading this summary to get the idea.

The basic idea is this: most developers optimize for the wrong thing, as they dive into technical intricacies instead of focusing on business domains. To keep themselves relevant and feel important, they invent ever more complex frameworks and create multiple layers of abstraction. This scares away newbies and allows to hide from the stakeholders behind technical gibberish, claiming that coding takes too much of their time to engage in business decision-making.

While this strategy works fine for the developers most of the time, it drives a wedge between them and the rest of the society, including business owners, who struggle to justify the high salaries. It also creates the need to learn new frameworks all the time, even if old boring ones could do the job, cultivating ageism in the industry because the older developers get tired of playing this game and thus are likely to be stamped as "not team players", i.e. not organization men.

The alternative is to pick the most boring stack of technologies, enjoying the power of Lindy effect, and learn everything about business processes in a particular area, as automation thereof is what counts in the real world. Then one can self-market as a "reg-/fin-/agritech specialist" instead of "someone who knows Go & K8s".

The downside here is that hot sectors change as often as hot technologies, but learning about the former is a lot harder. However, tech is a sector of its own, and as such is subject to market downturns. Thus, a devopp should do at least as well in a market environment similar to that after bursting of the dotcom bubble - and better, if they are familiar with multiple independent sectors and therefore don't have to worry as much about one of them going out of fashion among investors.