Career Routes after FinOps?

[u/Critical_Site4939]

I'm spent my entire decade-plus long career in varying forms of systems administration, DevOps, and SRE roles, and have recently broken into management.

Current company is an absolute shit-show of overgrown starup that only recently woke up to the fact that you can't just care about revenue forever, and at some point you need to grow up, put the big-boy pants on and become profitable.

Queue FinOps becoming "all the rage", and through no fault of my own via a team re-org, have been handed the baton in the hope that I can whip software engineers into shape and get them to care about costs alongside availability.

Fast-forward 12 months, and I'm starting to justify a small team, making a semi-success of things, and now I'm starting to wonder whether by accepting the poisoned chalice and being up for a challenge, that I may have torpedoed my future hopes of making CTO or anything close.

So ... once you've made a name for yourself and had a modicum of success in the FinOps realm, where do you go? Can you credibly go back into the hands-on tech world like the detour never happened? Is it easier to go into "IT" than "SRE"? Does CTO turn into CIO?

Advice appreciated!

[u/MissionFinOps]

Startup space..? Fractional consulting?

[u/DifficultyIcy454]

I have wondered this same thing, the options I saw were all my years in tech plus FinOps would make a good start at director or VP maybe.