Yeah, operations-focused engineers will continue to have a niche carved out for them because too many devs black-box infrastructure.
Companies can either choose to have their devs take on ops responsibilities or continue having dedicated ops jobs.
In either case, whether or not dedicated ops jobs exist, ops responsibilities always will. I'll be there to pick up the slack because designing and maintaining systems is an interesting job that has to be done that a lot of people can't/won't do and it pays accordingly.
People overlook that there's a common systematic belief that looks like this:
1) Developers don't code on prod
2) Prod needs to be protected
3) Therefore, developers need to be restricted from prod
One of my teams went through the process of "let's do DevOps!" with the intent of giving developers the ability of pushing something all the way through to prod on AWS. Months later, this resulted in having a poorly-supported dev-only VPC with IAM/policy restrictions, and other "official" VPCs that devs are locked out of in various ways. Since then, devs had little incentive to learn and are again reliant on Ops for any deployment problems.
There's a common systematic belief of that because that's the sort of thing a lot of actual compliance regulations de facto require (i.e., they demand controls around software deploys, and putting enforcing that in the same hands as those wanting to deploy it, i.e., devs, will fail an audit).
Source: My employer is currently undergoing SOX compliance
I can relate to every sentence you wrote, minus certain details.
I like and enjoy my coworkers but our respective interests are too dissimilar. The interactions at work never go deeper than the current objective or niceties. This is completely fine (for now) but in the future I would love to be on a true team.
Going home is indeed meh. As much as it feels nice to unwind, I'd much rather unwind with my gang.
I used to be on a sports team and lived morning, day, and night with my boys. Even though life was chaotic, it was incredible to have a gang. One thing I know for certain is that I could do more to gain that back. Short-term I plan on (1) joining an adult sports league and (2) hit up the super interesting people I've met since moving.
But long-term I believe lifestyle redesign is the only solution to our highly atomized world. I look to the past for ideas.
Companies can either choose to have their devs take on ops responsibilities or continue having dedicated ops jobs.
In either case, whether or not dedicated ops jobs exist, ops responsibilities always will. I'll be there to pick up the slack because designing and maintaining systems is an interesting job that has to be done that a lot of people can't/won't do and it pays accordingly.