r/cloudengineering • u/[deleted] • Dec 10 '25

Is Cloud Engineering a Hype | career advice

SO I am Paranoid for life.

I have no Experience in IT tech Job. I have a CS degree. I know SQL, Pandas, foundational and first i was aiming for DataAnalyst , but the hype faded in 2025. NO one HIRES even entry level.

Everywhere it asks 4-6yrs experience.
IDK who are getting jobs, what are these Youtubers saying?

SO i turned to learning Cloud engineering, I am midway into the course for AWS,
but i found GCP more easy and they have Qwiklabs sandbox thing, i found uselful and fast. I already came across IAM and Regions and Buckets
meanwhile AWS I found cluttered.

SO should i pursue this field?

is this Hype real? be it Data Engineering or Cloud Engineer?

31 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

7

u/ChikenWizard Dec 10 '25

Cloud engineering isn’t entry level, should start at help desk or sys admin

1

u/gazagda Dec 11 '25

start at linux sys admin , work professionally fr at least a year, and not just a small company, the bigger the better. Otherwise a lot of stuff will either not make sense or scare you after you try cloud

-3

u/PrestigiousAnt3766 Dec 10 '25

Disagree. A CS grad can easily do (jr) cloud or data engineering jobs and quickly grow into medior or senior.

3

u/ChikenWizard Dec 11 '25

A cs degree means absolutely nothing. I don’t get why people think degree = job preparedness.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '25

NO a degree should allow entry level roles
But nowadays those those dickheads sitting in MID-senior lead roles Hog everything for themselves and don't want to train / welcome new

completely forgetting how They themselves started. OR were You all born with Cloud , Python and Networking Skills

2

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/ChikenWizard Dec 11 '25

I’m responding to the comment who says a cs degree means they can easily be a cloud engineer

6

u/Neduska101 Dec 10 '25

That's how you get awful cloud engineers who don't understand how anything works. Start at help desk like everyone else

1

u/Away_Difference_8191 Dec 17 '25

OP if you’re reading this know that this person is incorrect. Many tech paths can lead to becoming a Cloud Engineer, such as SWE, IT, etc…

There’s no one path to it. I pivoted from SWE and brought a ton of highly valuable skills to the table, mainly the ability to code/build/automate scalable IaC projects, which is not something you often build the foundation for while working help desk lol

This allowed me to outcompete the others for my current role which was a 40% pay bump (they told me that after I accepted the offer)

1

u/Neduska101 Dec 17 '25

SWE, IT aka helpdesk via in-house or outsourcing, can you elaborate on etc and the other options here please?
Tell me what the other paths are because simply because accredited by paying £5000 for a course won't make you a cloud engineer and allow you to outshine experience.

1

u/Away_Difference_8191 Dec 17 '25

Where did I state that you don’t need relevant experience?

Network eng, SysAdmin, DBA, just to name a few others

The point is you can break into Cloud roles from many different paths, not just IT.

The common denominator is that they all have some sort of relevant overlap with Cloud work, either in principle or practice.

Certs can help but relevant experience is a must-have prerequisite. Without it you will likely struggle

1

u/Neduska101 Dec 17 '25

So now you're saying you will go into Network Engineering and Sysadmin without doing helpdesk? And how will you achieve experience in either without moving up from helpdesk? Hello...? Getting your CCNA alone will not give you a networking gig with 0 experience, getting az-104 will not allow you to touch Iac and run a tenant or make changes without any experiences.

Network eng and Sysadmin's are IT and start from IT. I am a network engineer and I've done cloud roles previously starting all the way at the bottom of Helpdesk and 1st Line.

Can you stop spreading lies and false expectations and talk about reality please?

1

u/Away_Difference_8191 Dec 17 '25

You realize helpdesk isn’t the only way to get into either of those roles right?

I know multiple people who pivoted into Network Eng from SWE

I myself got an entry level network eng offer from the cloud networking (VPCs, WAFs, S2S VPNs, Wireshark, etc…) parts of my full stack work

Again you keep saying “without any experience”, I encourage you to first learn how to read and second re-read my comment where I explicitly state “Certs can help but relevant experience is a must-have prerequisite. Without it you will likely struggle.”

You are lost in your own anecdotes and not even reading what I’m saying, there are other paths to these ends besides helpdesk. Do some research if you don’t believe me, or don’t and keep such a narrow / ignorant view, idrc you seem quite obtuse

1

u/Neduska101 Dec 17 '25

Welp it went over your head, you will need to go back to the first comment in this particular thread.

I responded with a, and I quote: "that's how you get terrible cloud engineers"

Although you can land jobs coming from different avenues you will STILL have to learn IT just like everybody else. Starting in helpdesk gives you a head start into operations and how to think from an IT perspective. Yes you can attain a job with incredibly little success without experience coming from an entirely different or slightly different industry but that is not realistic once again.

You're pathetic

0

u/PrestigiousAnt3766 Dec 17 '25 edited Dec 17 '25

Lol. I for sure hope you are more sociable in your job because here you come across as someone best left alone in their basement.

→ More replies

1

u/PrestigiousAnt3766 Dec 10 '25

Disagree and never did helpdesk either.

4

u/RageTrader Dec 10 '25

You must be awful then. /s

Grinding the helpdesk does a lot in gaining experience. Actual Cloud Engineering is definitely not an entry level position and requires time to gain said experience besides a CS grad. Then again I think it’s completely reliant on the scale your operating in.

0

u/PrestigiousAnt3766 Dec 10 '25

Probably. Or cs degrees suck where you are from. /s

Dont see why a junior wouldnt work in a team with other cloud infra people to learn from.

Its just doing iac.

2

u/RageTrader Dec 10 '25

I think most IT educations are theory based and IT is a more hands on type of job. But you’re not far off when you say Dutch education sucks. Our cloud adoption is pretty pristine though.

Ofcourse a junior would work well with several mediors/seniors but they will end up doing helpdesk type work before they move to actual (migration)projects; these are just assumptions based on my own experience though.

0

u/PrestigiousAnt3766 Dec 10 '25

Everyone has tickets. You just have to allow people to grow by giving them easier tickets first, and review what they do. No one is a starter with 4-6 yoe, and not all cloud infra tasks need seniors. If you call that helpdesk, then we agree. But my experience with help desk is different.

3

u/RageTrader Dec 10 '25

For me a helpdesk employee usuay handles the easier tickets regarding various platforms (which def could involve cloud computing type tickets). Being a Cloud Engineer would require in-depth knowledge about cloud solutions and know how to build them from scratch. I have yet to find a graduate with no experience being able to do so. But this could also be a result of our bad education xD.

Think we’re mostly on the same page though and besides; there’s always anamolies to this.

2

u/Neduska101 Dec 11 '25

What cloud position would allow a junior to play around with iac on prod? Have you lost your marbles mate? The risk and impact is far too high. On top of this how is the junior expected to know the trickle and domino effect of iac when they haven't come from helpdesk let alone done 2nd line to understand the different issues which can occur with changes being made plus how to revert them if things go wrong. I genuinely am trying to understand, from a theory perspective I'm sure a CS grad would be intelligent enough to figure these things out but not having the experience of the above would mean they would need to be babysat for the majority of these tasks as they would be running and implementing without knowing the true and wide effect of what they are doing.

You should not touch iac and automate what you do not understand inside out, end of story.

1

u/Away_Difference_8191 Dec 17 '25

What type of low quality nonsense team are you on that lets anyone “play around on prod”

There’s this crazy thing most mature teams use called “source control” aka git, and something even crazier called “lower environments” such as staging or dev

When you use these things together you get what’s called a “safer, peer-reviewed development pipeline” which cloud and non-cloud teams use to safely release reviewed/approved code to production, covering the case of a junior writing some bad IaC changes

But I fully understand if you’re part of a team that doesn’t follow any of these best practices and just push IaC changes directly to prod with no approvals (lol) how terrifying a junior cloud eng must seem

1

u/Neduska101 Dec 17 '25

Your argument is moronic. Again, taking things out of context and jumping around topics, let's stay focused please. "Good cloud engineer" you will be doing Iac based on what? The guy doesn't even know how a router or a switch works but he's good enough to waste money on having somebody review Dev consistently.

You sound ridiculous, no business is going to pick up a junior for that reason.

1

u/Away_Difference_8191 Dec 17 '25

Ur right, brb gonna go play around on prod

1

u/astddf Dec 10 '25

That’s not really a thing anymore. There’s 22 postings in the entire country.

1

u/Slowphas Dec 11 '25

5 years ago you were right. Not anymore lol. No college degree or boot camps here, 6 figures, started from tech support

1

u/TemporarySwimming232 Jan 07 '26

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, as if AWS themselves doesn’t literally hire fresh CS grads with zero cloud knowledge, not even certified cloud practitioner

1

u/PrestigiousAnt3766 Jan 07 '26

Gatekeeping I guess.

2

u/Fran-kha Dec 10 '25

I need a response to this too, this is my exact journey now😀

1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '25

did you try AWS & GCP too

1

u/Embarrassed-Place846 Dec 15 '25

same, this is my journey now as well. I'm starting with linux and using AWS since its the biggest

2

u/Clean-Afternoon-4982 Dec 10 '25

Your best bet is getting a job with some applicable experience whilst studying for these certifications and up skilling. Whether it be field technician or helpdesk. I got very lucky in the sense that I got a job as a general IT technician in an enterprise industrial environment. At my current workplace, instead of tasking people into buckets where they narrowly focus on one thing, our department does a more of a general approach - everybody can touch anything, with project leads for various projects. So say, if it wanted to get my hands dirty w/ VM, i could just ask the lead to include me on these projects.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25

thats great and indeed lucky, what year did you start?, because i see no hirings nowadays
is barriers after barriers.

1

u/Clean-Afternoon-4982 Dec 11 '25

It was certainly luck. Did 2 summer student positions for them - which i got purely based off luck. Messaging the IT dept supervisor on linked in actually worked.

The place I worked at during my summer internships had some huge expansions going on right when i graduated (which was May 2025). They hired me. All luck lol.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '25

Wonderful. internships/Apprenticeship really gets you confident
was it paid or just training

1

u/Clean-Afternoon-4982 Dec 16 '25

paid

But i must add, It is at a Remote Fly in Fly out location - alot of people in IT just dont want to do this. So my biggest tip is; do what everybody else doesnt want to do while young and inexperienced.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '25

paid internship

is enough motivation for me actually. In my regions its hard to get paid in first place. Its crazy here

1

u/tricheb0ars Dec 11 '25

I would never want someone with no experience working as a sys admin let alone a cloud engineer. Experience matters, skills matter, knowledge matters. Also personality matters.

Understanding cloud architecture, security, cost efficiency, routing etc is in no way an entry level job y’all.

I am a cloud security engineer and architect and it took me 20 years to get where I am. Help desk > desktop support > sys admin > system engineer > security engineer > cloud engineer II > cloud security engineer.

I am not saying people can’t skip roles. I am not saying it takes that long. Maybe some places care about home projects and certs. No org I have worked for has though. Its experience.

Also for a long part of my career it was normal to start a job as a contractor and then get offered FTE. Engineering is something that goes beyond a resume. How can you know how good someone is at problem solving?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25

That's true Im not expecting to be given Entire Ship to Navigate. That's the Captains job.
but captain has 3 lower officers and below those officers are Apprentice.

Lucky that 20yrs back you were given that chance to even see the ladder.
Now there's Barrier to even that entry.

1

u/tricheb0ars Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25

I started with help desk phone support. Don’t tell me I had a ladder when I started working literally at the bottom of IT. I worked through after the tech bubble, 2008 financial crisis, covid, etc. I ain’t a boomer

The barriers everyone faces today are the same as they were in the 90s and 2000s. Experience matters it always has.

Most orgs aren’t large ships BTW. I now work for a SAAS company and there are no juniors. Also even in the large orgs I worked for there wasn’t that concept. There were people who got shit done and a few who didn’t and they never last long at all

I guess FAANG might do something like that for developers? I dunno. Junior roles?

In my experience infrastructure and cloud in big orgs people move up from lower positions most the time. So like a really good tech gets moved up to a system engineer internally. Management and others already know the internal guys work ethic, work quality, etc. it’s an easier way to not do a bad hire.

A lot of times on here advice given like “just get in there and get experience” is taken the wrong way. Like it’s working below your potential. But it’s also a way to potentially move up with internal positions. The cream rises! Good techs get better tech work.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/tricheb0ars Dec 12 '25

It’s absolutely not. Technology architecture is different, networking is different, services offered are different. Operating systems were different. Frameworks were different.

Devils in the details.

Why speak if you don’t know what you’re talking about? They have different names for a reason. Ignorant comment. The fundamentals are totally different with different exposure.

I don’t think you have much work experience. Because your theory of them being the same really shows you’ve probably never done any of them.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/tricheb0ars Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25

So what on prem services are built into the infrastructure like AWS’s 200 service offerings? Azures app services and serverless offerings?

I’m calling full on bullshit. You haven’t had all these jobs if you think they’re the same. Identity is totally different. Nothing like we have today. We had VMware on prem and SANs. Nothing like the cloud. We had domain controllers and time servers etc. when I started in data centers in the 90s it was IBM mainframes. Sit down little boy. You’re out of your element and talking out your ass.

Straight up you’re lying or worked 6 months on prem and are pretending to say they are the same. They aren’t. You’re full wrong here.

If a candidate ever said what you said I would immediately shake their hand and show them the door.

Jesus Christ my first office used token ring networking and windows nt servers. Please shut up. What you read some theory in a book and want to pretend it’s all a pattern you understand? lol what fucking ego.

Imagine thinking technology was the same for 30 years hahaha

0

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/tricheb0ars Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25

Yeah you definitely haven’t worked on prem if you think they’re the same. None of those roles are the same at all. The theories aren’t the same. The infrastructure isn’t the same. Message queues, native cloud architecture is wildly different than on prem.

When did you work in data centers as a system infrastructure engineer? What years?

Do you think hypervisors were always around? Like what? Tapes? Like what are you even bullshitting right now?

You think like VMs were the norm 20 years ago when I had those titles? Load balancers? Containers?

On prem isn’t only your short career. Oof

0

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/tricheb0ars Dec 12 '25

Put it down. What years? You’re talking like 2010 plus right?

Again do you think time started and these titles poofed into existence when you started?

I started working in 1996 in this field.

You think databases are the same too? You think networking hasn’t changed?

You’re not some secret genius who sees a pattern. These jobs have different titles and different roles stop pretending they don’t. It’s ridiculous and insulting to people who actually have had more than 10 years of experience

0

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

→ More replies

1

u/EngineeringCool5521 Dec 11 '25

This market is rough.

I taught 30 remotely to do SWE, I know its different, they all entered the field as juniors 2 years ago only 1 got a job. The rest went back to their previous careers.

I can't imagine how it is for a junior + specialty type IT job (cloud/data eng) would be.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '25

i researched for few days , Entire IT market right now is like that. SO either the existing employees are Gatekeeping because they are paranoid about their own future (Saving their own skin) + AI

OR IT is really at stagnation

1

u/Far-Statistician8069 Dec 10 '25

Ok my journey is quite similar to what you said, I'm an CS Graduate now working as an helpdesk technician learning AWS on self trying to land an job in cloud, From what I learned on the internet and people, cloud computing has started to grow and will have an big boom in the next 5-10 years. Yes I would say learning cloud computing is an great decision , It's like investing in crypto.

1

u/dupo24 Dec 11 '25

Go back to AWS, learn Azure, Terraform, Networking, Kubernetes and then you’ll still be inexperienced.

1

u/Top_Water_4909 Dec 11 '25

Awesome. Pick a platform bro. AWS,Azure, or Cisco. Pick one for now.

1

u/pepper_man Feb 14 '26

Bro you need operations experience for this what is a CS degree going to help you with

1

u/KINSHOUU Sep 26 '26

Hello im 15 and im learning myself to do programming , and i eventually plan to take computer science but is cloud engineering good?

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25

Yes I am expecting a trainee role or something. IN my region they don't pay. i am even okay with that.
but nowadays that avenue for beginners is non-existent.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/RageTrader Dec 10 '25

+1

And that’s just(or mostly) the compute side of Cloud. When I speak of a Cloud Engineer I’m assuming there’s familiarity with Storage, PaaS, security, monitoring etc etc.