I worked at a large internet company in the mid-late 00s, and the typical team composition was a handful of developers, a product manager, a designer (if you worked on customer facing UI), a project manager (for large enough projects), QAs, and a SRE.
Every team had dedicated engineers whose sole purpose was to place purchase orders for servers, set up and manage databases, deploy changes, monitor uptime and more. And this was standard practice across the industry, as soon as your company outgrew a shared host.
Even the thought of something like this would be absurd today. So I'd flip the "no one admits they don't to it" around – your company does DevOps already, whether you realize/admit it or not.
Every team had dedicated engineers whose sole purpose was to place purchase orders for servers, set up and manage databases, deploy changes, monitor uptime and more. And this was standard practice across the industry, as soon as your company outgrew a shared host.
Even the thought of something like this would be absurd today. So I'd flip the "no one admits they don't to it" around – your company does DevOps already, whether you realize/admit it or not.