DevOps Didn't Fail - We Just Finally Gave it the Tools it Deserve
devops.com, Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
Every once in a while, our industry needs a good, sharp elbow to the ribs. Not a cheap shot. A wake-up jab. That's exactly what Charity Majors delivered in her recent Honeycomb blog post, 'You Had One Job: Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do It.'
If you've known Charity as long as I have, you know this is her superpower. She's never been shy about an opinion. She's dynamic, fearless, and above all else, really sharp. I admire and respect her tremendously, and I genuinely enjoy having her involved in Techstrong activities. She makes every conversation better by refusing to let it get comfortable.
Her argument, boiled down, is this: DevOps set out to do one core thing, get developers to care about their software in production, and by that measure, it failed. Not dead. Not useless. But failed at its primary mission. That's a provocative take, and like most good provocations, there's a lot in it I agree with and some I don't.