Considering a Transition from Developer to DevOps: A Smart Move?
Are you curious about the benefits and drawbacks of switching from a Developer role to a DevOps role?
#Developer #DevOps #CareerChange #Transition #MarketDemand
Taking the Leap: A Personal Reflection
Current Situation:
– Currently a successful senior developer
– Praised by superiors for performance
– Offered opportunity to become company’s DevOps person
Opportunity Knocks:
– Company lacks dedicated DevOps person
– Potential to learn new skills and broaden experience
– Could lead to growth and advancement in career
Considerations:
– Impact on career progression with 10 years of coding experience
– Market demand for DevOps professionals
– Balancing the benefits of gaining experience in the current role vs. transitioning to DevOps
Seeking Insights:
– Interested in hearing from others who have made a similar career change
– Want to know about experiences, challenges, and successes in transitioning from Developer to DevOps
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to explore a new path in your career and expand your skill set! #CareerTransition #NewOpportunities #PersonalGrowth
I feel like there’s almost no cap on dev salaries. I feel like it’s rare (and could be wrong) to see a devops TC go that much further above 200-220k? But idk.
Do you get paid more?
In general, cons:
– More on-call
– More boring ops/configuration kind of work (yaml guru)
– Often more responsiblity (SLOs)
– Less thankful work (not being thanked for prevented outages but stared at when down)
– FAANG requires DevOps AND coding skills for interviews (Linux/HTTP and leetcode)
– More tooling/technology learning needed (tooling landscape moves very quickly and is [big](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2020/07/6b2f1a36-screen-shot-2020-07-17-at-8.17.23-am.png) )
All in all, for me it was the wrong decision to move from SWE to DevOps/SRE. So take my post with a grain of salt, I am biased.
Every ladder’s comp structure overlaps.
A creative director makes more than a junior SWE, even though obviously the average artist/designer makes much less.
Ladders also all converge at higher levels of seniority. Devops and eng both are run by the same person eventually, whether the CTO, or a VP or Director. That person understanding how to run both sides is a big asset.
But overall at the same level devops is generally paid less, and the ceiling for a devops IC role is lower. The job has different work where it will be more or less interesting depending on your preferences.
It will also have a different cadence, probably more chill most of the time (assuming things are run decently), but then also if critical things break at midnight it’s then your problem, and if you’re the only one then you have no one to split an oncall schedule with.
So yeah, being the first devops person is potentially a good career move insofar as it enables you to have a clear path to leading that function, that moves you closer to leading engineering/etc overall, and that’s what you want and are prepared to push on. Or insofar as you like that work more. Apples to apples, staying at same level on both sides, probably not a good move though.
FWIW that strategy of getting experience owning a lot of different things can be a good strategy for positioning yourself for leadership, as long as the experience is actually deep and heavy, like owning all of devops (which will be stressful to manage). I basically did that just not with devops.
Devops more likely to be laid off. Period.
DevOps are boring and people only see negatives in your work, if system works they ignore you, if system doesn’t work they blame you.
Have some DevOps knowledge and skills are nice and helpful though.
I went from mid-level developer to DevOps role finishing a contractor’s work and after a year of that got let go. Was also asked to become the DevOps person so not something I directly volunteered for and it was offered to me because I was the fastest learner in our development team.
The role was enjoyable up until they let me go so as long as your company seems like they want you around it should be fun. In this market I would also keep yourself prepared for the worst so use any extra time you have to brush up on interviews and regular SWE skills. If your company really only has 7 developers I wouldn’t worry you’d be close to getting let go as that’s significantly smaller than the size of company I worked for.
I’d say it’s worth a shot since you’re already senior level. At worst, you just get a different senior level role. At best, you love it and get to expand your skill set. Getting to learn from someone else rather than doing it from scratch is also a key factor.
historically SWE + DevOps experience could pave the way for pretty good jobs. since having solid SRE and SWE skills generally makes people somewhat better at both domains. they can write code that makes SRE easier, and deploy infra that makes SWE easier.
however, now I am not so sure about this anymore. deep domain expertise can take people to principal as well. bigger companies seem to hire the top most prolific players in their niche. i am not so sure the market is as good for a wide and deep type developer anymore.
i dont really know though. would be interesting to see some solid research on this.
Nobody notices when there wasn’t an outage, but everyone notices when there was one. You usually get paid more because people at least understand that it’s your job to prevent the worst. Depending on your organization you may be tapped the blaze trails regarding new technology or techniques, which is dope but it also means you have to like learning and teaching even more than the average engineer.
I got shuffled into DevOps. I joined a company as an “infrastructure SWE”, promised I’d get to write code, and just ended up leading a team and doing high stress projects where you click around AWS to prove some weird networking thing worked.
Now, there’s no way I could have done that job without my software skills, but I had to leave because those skills were stagnating. Writing production code, reviews, building systems for end users, all that was out.
You sound like you’re at the level I was at when I switched: and it’s fun at first to do new work and learn a ton, eventually that wears off and your just left as a SWE doing non SWE work. Cant pay me enough for that, and I left to do a start up, and am a SwE at big tech now
In a software development organization, one of these roles is expendable, and the other is required. A software developer can help with operations and deployments. An operator usually doesn’t or can’t help code software.
the better you are, the less problems, the more they think “hey. let’s fire this guy. clearly we do not need him anymore. everything works just fine”
Unless you really like being Ops and supporting role, don’t.
I’m confused, what is a “Developer who isn’t DevOps”? You mean you write the code then hand it off and wash your hands of implementation? You aren’t controlling the whole lifecycle from reqs gathing to deployment and ongoing updates? And you can sleep at night, knowing you’re not doing the whole cycle?
Pros: more jobs, more money (potentially)
Cons: more stress (oncall, emergencies), depending on company
Pro
– Control; You gain control of your stack and frequently as a side-effect control over your position/job.
– More possibilities; If I can roll everything out on my own I’m literally a one man shop that can roll into any town (job)
Con
– On call
– People may throw more on your lap with no payoff
In my experience when you gain enough importance/control within a company you can eliminate the cons by simply refusing to do it. I imagine this is not feasible with fortune 500 companies, which is why I like medium-sized companies that make money.
In my case it was a natural choice as I had already been doing it for my own stuff since the late 90s as a hobbyist/kid. I leveraged my current job to WFH for the last 13 years which has made my work life a disgustingly privileged existence.
The fact you have a dedicated “DevOps” role is immediately concerning.
The whole point of DevOps is that you don’t need these roles. You build understanding of Dev and Ops problems and challenges between teams, and use similar practices and workflows (manage infrastructure as code, policy as code, etc).
What are you doing in a DevOps role that you couldn’t be doing as a developer? Learning more about the infrastructure and how it’s managed? Building better ops workflows?
It still blows my mind that the original thoughts on DevOps from Andrew Clay Shafer have been completely nullified.
I’m a current staff level engineer with 20 yoe and have experienced this situation.
I don’t see any upside to moving into devops at all. I would flat out reject the move, in fact I did reject a similar offer when I was approached to do this back in 2010. My reasons were, and still are: I don’t think it is a good career move for all of the reasons people have already posted. I was later laid off by the company and I know for a fact it was because I rejected that “opportunity”. So if you reject this, it may have implications for your career.
I was a mid level developer back then and I do not believe I would be staff now if I accepted their offer. There are definitely opportunities in devops but if your company has nobody and is trying to move an existing swe into that role, I’m guessing room for growth would be limited, and the reason is devops grows slower than other orgs. How many swe’s would they need to add before they add a 2nd devops guy? And how many would they need to add before they need a team that you can lead?
The only upside I can see to accepting their offer is if you love doing devops work and want to make it your career. For most SWE’s, that is not the case and also why all your colleagues miraculously have no experience with it (they claim). I’m guessing everyone at your company is trying to make themselves look as unappealing as possible so that they don’t get involuntarily selected for it.
Splitting up when there’s just 7 devs feels like you’re just wasting money, so if you find DevOps entertaining, go and have fun.