DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it.
When I mention "systems administration" to younger coworkers, they look at me like I'm a crusty old relic out of touch with modern engineering. People have no sense of history and little understanding of where the devops role came from and what it really means. I had a CTO tell me he hadn't heard the term "system administration" in ten years.
What were our devops people doing? Running web servers, managing networks, configuring DNS, managing backups, configuring cloud services. Absolutely none of it in support of the dev team I was on. The developers were responsible for managing their own CI/CD pipeline and deployments. The people called the "DevOps Team" were responsible for managing production. In this case, they were systems administrators and were not in any way a devops team, but the terminology is so skewed now that they were labeled as such, and I was labeled an out of touch old greybeard.
This isn't to demean devops in any way; it's a valuable role, an evolutionary step in software team organization, but by no means is it new and by no means is systems administration a dead role.
When I hear systems administration I assume it's pets not cattle, and that you're administering individual named servers with bash scripts rather than administering a mesos cluster with chef or puppet or whatever.
I'm not sure where I picked up this impression from.
It comes from bright, talented SWEs who do not, bless their hearts, understand that IT Operations is an entire profession unto its own, and not merely the grunt-work they are forced to do while working as interns or juniors.
I know that "DevOps" is one of those terms that can mean whatever the user wants it to mean (like "agile" and "REST" and so on), but at least with DevOps, I've mostly only seen 2 types of common definitions:
1) "DevOps teams" are just rebranded operations teams
2) "DevOps teams" are teams that are responsible for both development and operations for their app
I think the first one is the one you're frustrated with, and I agree it's a completely useless label when used like that, but it's not definitely not the only way it's used.
Being a "Build-Release Engineer", essentially the sysadmin of the development tool chain, has existed since at least the 90's.
But the roots can be traced to the 70's (the PDP-11 had the compile-link process).
If you were really smart and could program in Assembler they called you a "Systems Programmer".
In the 80's, the PC revolution fostered debates over how much centralized control IT should have.
There was a long-standing debate in computing as to where the software should live (that is on a server or at the client level).
This debate was settled when Google invested heavily in making the browser a powerful and stable platform (think about Javascript in the 90's vs. today).
So the modern situation is server=cloud and client=browser. This creates a demand for people who understand how software is built/deployed/maintained in this environment.
So we slap the Devops label on it and pretend we understand what's going on.
But it's really a debate about how long the current status quo will last before it's subsumed by something else.
When I mention "systems administration" to younger coworkers, they look at me like I'm a crusty old relic out of touch with modern engineering. People have no sense of history and little understanding of where the devops role came from and what it really means. I had a CTO tell me he hadn't heard the term "system administration" in ten years.
What were our devops people doing? Running web servers, managing networks, configuring DNS, managing backups, configuring cloud services. Absolutely none of it in support of the dev team I was on. The developers were responsible for managing their own CI/CD pipeline and deployments. The people called the "DevOps Team" were responsible for managing production. In this case, they were systems administrators and were not in any way a devops team, but the terminology is so skewed now that they were labeled as such, and I was labeled an out of touch old greybeard.
This isn't to demean devops in any way; it's a valuable role, an evolutionary step in software team organization, but by no means is it new and by no means is systems administration a dead role.