What I find confusing is how in a perspective he serves the DevOps methodology by pushing DevOps tooling and Human interaction, but in the other he seems to be doing the sysadmin work for the rest of his team, which seems contradictory from a higher (managerial) perspective.

He isn’t pushing human interaction. That is part of the job and problem solving. There was this story going around about what kind of developer you are: cowboy or farmer? Good devops people are plumbers.* Plumbers get stuff working by making sure all the disparate components of the the whole system work together. Human interactions are necessarily part of the whole system.

A solution can be technically fantastic, and yet people may not adopt it for one reason or another. You have to get buy-in from people.

I recently interviewed at a place where they vaguely know they needed devops but there wasn’t sufficient buy-in. I made the mistake of taking the interviews at face value. I should have been treating it as consultation from the get-go, drawing out any issues they might have (by starting with pain points), coming up with solutions. I didn’t realize I can be applying the same skills I have while working to at the very earliest stages.

If I were to build a consultation firm, I would sell organizations on the human interaction (because that is easier for people-managers to grasp; it is what they fo for their jobs). However, if I were hiring someone within my hypothetical consultation firm to do this kind of work, I would look at their problem solving mindset and people skills, at whatever experience level they are at.

*And it seems reading that Small Farmer Journal article about how to get started as a farmer with no money, real farmers have to problem solve too.