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.