Tell me why I shouldn’t become a devOps engineer


 I started my first job as a developer a few months ago. Lately, my manager has been assigning various DevOps tasks to me, and I’ve been loving it.

My most recent project was to create a tool that automates the tracking of certain usage metrics and generates a report for management daily. The amount of thought and care I had to put into designing this tool to be efficient and effective was so satisfying to me.

I feel like I’d be happy doing things like this full time, but at the same time, I know I’ve only scratched the surface of what a DevOps engineer does.

Is there any reason I shouldn’t specialize and become a DevOps engineer? Do they get paid less? Is it harder to find jobs? Is the work more intense? What kind of person is best suited for life as a DevOps engineer?

Any input is appreciated. Thanks in advance!


Sarah:

In my experience, DevOps is paid at or slightly above SDEs. I get contacted by recruiters daily for DevOps jobs. Work is quite intense and a bit more high-stakes than development (you have the weight of your company's uptime on your back). The best kind of person is someone that can:

  • deal with a large amount of ambiguity

  • massive amount of context switching (ADD and ADHD is a huge help)

  • self-starter

  • good researcher

  • an excellent investigator

  • is naturally curious

  • can politically handle working with many different teams/people

  • works well under high pressure

  • expert troubleshooter

Here are some of the cons:

  • On-call, most DevOps get put on some sort of on-call

  • High stress is a bottleneck for infrastructure that other teams require

  • Jack of all trades master of none, you will have a wide variety of expertise, but nowhere near as deep as an SDE

  • Clickops...

  • Less development more YAML

This is just off the top of my head. There are some other things that weigh me down. However, I get paid well for my work and I work less than 40hrs a week, so I can't complain. Also, the labor market for DevOps right now is SUPER tight. Companies need us really, really badly.

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