>devops practitioners tend to draw lines to limit their responsibility in the software building process
I'd say you hit the nail on the head here. I would agree that DevOps does indeed stem from operations folks saying that they don't want full responsibility for how software runs in production, instead introducing tooling and processes to force more of these concerns onto devs.
As to terminology, "DevOps engineers" are ops engineers who adhere to this approach (or being a bit cynical, those who just have familiarity with relevant tooling and like the sound of that term).
And as to whether this is productive or not, I would argue that it's made the individual developer somewhat less productive on the metric of "writing code", but the overall organization more productive on the metric of "deploying working code that serves users".
I'd say you hit the nail on the head here. I would agree that DevOps does indeed stem from operations folks saying that they don't want full responsibility for how software runs in production, instead introducing tooling and processes to force more of these concerns onto devs.
As to terminology, "DevOps engineers" are ops engineers who adhere to this approach (or being a bit cynical, those who just have familiarity with relevant tooling and like the sound of that term).
And as to whether this is productive or not, I would argue that it's made the individual developer somewhat less productive on the metric of "writing code", but the overall organization more productive on the metric of "deploying working code that serves users".