It's not so much that DevOps is killing the developer as it's the expectation that you can have your regular general purpose developers do your DevOps on the side.
I can relate to the downsides pretty well - I'm the only developer in my group and my job is mostly to develop web apps, but the IT side doesn't have much knowledge of modern tools - they live in the era 'just use Drupal and Apache' so I'm often the one who ends up having to figure out the deployment of the applications I work on (and also help with random problems from their OTB apps) and such.
To be honest, I don't mind when it's DB stuff because I'm pretty comfortable with it and have plenty of background with various SQL DBs, and it's not a time black hole, but when it comes to configuring servers and deployment I hate having to deal with the DevOps because there are so many pieces I never have the time to really become comfortable with them all and I feel very inefficient. Accomplishing something doesn't always take long itself, but it can require spending a day of reading wikis and documentation to accomplish something simple when you've got a lot of moving parts. And the worst part is that you have to deal with the DevOps bits so infrequently it's like you have to relearn them each time.
I can relate to the downsides pretty well - I'm the only developer in my group and my job is mostly to develop web apps, but the IT side doesn't have much knowledge of modern tools - they live in the era 'just use Drupal and Apache' so I'm often the one who ends up having to figure out the deployment of the applications I work on (and also help with random problems from their OTB apps) and such.
To be honest, I don't mind when it's DB stuff because I'm pretty comfortable with it and have plenty of background with various SQL DBs, and it's not a time black hole, but when it comes to configuring servers and deployment I hate having to deal with the DevOps because there are so many pieces I never have the time to really become comfortable with them all and I feel very inefficient. Accomplishing something doesn't always take long itself, but it can require spending a day of reading wikis and documentation to accomplish something simple when you've got a lot of moving parts. And the worst part is that you have to deal with the DevOps bits so infrequently it's like you have to relearn them each time.