Bring Back Ops Pride (xpost)

Operations engineering deserves respect and recognition as a critical technical discipline, not dismissal as toil or lesser work. The distinction between dev and ops is about separation of concerns—building features versus maintaining resilient infrastructure—not coding ability. Operations absorbs the hardest technical problems to make product development simpler. The industry's abandonment of "ops" as a term of pride has created a harmful feedback loop where talented engineers avoid operations roles, leading to poor operational outcomes. Platform engineering is essentially ops with product thinking applied. Clear naming and role definition matter because teams can't optimize for both efficiency (ops) and investment (product) simultaneously.