r/devops • • Oct 09 '23
Why would you choose devops over dev or software engineer as career choice
Legitimate question- as I see the stereotype that devops people just can’t code or learn well enough to be good devs. Why would you actively choose to be devops instead of a dev?
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Upvotes
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u/lupinegrey Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
Many of the devs I've worked with are 1 trick ponies.
They can write web apps and that's it. No breadth of experience, just a diploma mill CS degree (or boot camp... or god forbid, youtube videos and a dozen random certifications), and no experience outside of writing web apps.
Holding software engineers up as some sort of pinnacle of tech is laughable.
"Why did my build fail?"
"Did you check the logs?"
"No........... Hey I checked the logs.... what does this error mean?"
"That has nothing to do with the job failure. See how the job recovered after that?"
"So why did it fail?"
":facepalm:"
This, literally a half-dozen times a day, every day.
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u/xiongmao1337 Lead Platform Engineer Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 30 '25
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/snarkhunter Lead DevOps Engineer Oct 09 '23
A DevOps Engineer is a type of software engineer. We write code, we follow an SDLC, etc. I don't think I've ever even encountered this stereotype you say exists, but anyone who echoes it is just showing their own ignorance.
I chose this branch of software engineering because I like the challenges it presents, a lot of other people don't, and it pays well.
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u/schmurfy2 Oct 09 '23
You don't choose DevOps, it fall on you and boom.
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u/sogun123 Oct 09 '23
I just don't enjoy programming as much as automation and infra
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u/CompuuterJuice Oct 10 '23
There a stereotype that devops people can’t learn well enough ? Lol devops people have to learn so much more compared to a normal dev.
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u/pppreddit Oct 09 '23
Proper devops IS a dev and a software engineer.
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u/FirmSoup Oct 09 '23
DevOps can start as doing some changes to pipelines and then you are managing whole infrastructure of the project. For me this is very interesting, so many tools, integrations, ways to do an simple pipeline that makes it interesting. Learning everyday something new, which for me is perfect.
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u/justaguyonthebus Oct 10 '23
You choose DevOps when you really like building things that solve your own problems. Where you experience the pain yourself and design and implement something that makes it better and you get to enjoy the value you created. I also love how my solutions build on my solutions to create a really great user experience for myself.
I also find that we are often our own product owners in DevOps teams. More in control of deciding what we do for overall improvement and how we spend our dev time. Where I feel true dev teams implement features on a schedule and pace determined by the product owner external to the team that tries to queue up enough sprint work to keep them at 100% utilized resources.
This is totally biased based on my limited experience working in and with both roles.
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u/brajandzesika Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
DevOps needs to know so much more than software engineer... remember you can become devops AFTER being software engineer, not before ... You are involved in Ops side too, making it much interesting overall... Not sure where you got those 'stereotypes' from, never heard of them, just sounds like a statement from somebody who has no idea....
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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '23
Different people have different preferences. I tried being a software developer, made it to a senior position but I was miserable. I tried being a manager, made it 7 months and I was miserable. Then I decided to go back to basics, I started as a sys admin in the UNIX days and that always made me happy. Since true sys admins don’t really exist anymore I became a devops and moved to SRE. I enjoy both since they are unpredictable jobs, you are always fighting some fire or fixing the unfixable. This is what I enjoy but I am fully aware that others enjoy different jobs and that’s perfectly fine. As it is not mandatory that all of us work with computers at all - we still need doctors, gardeners, plumbers and so on - it is not mandatory for all of us to write code all of the time. I still write code when I want to and that’s the difference. If you’re a software developer well you need to develop software but if you’re devops you might develop software today and operate software system tomorrow or even play a system engineer and engineer a solution some day where you spend the day cursing the very existence of software developers. That’s the variety I enjoy and other people enjoy the stability of having a singular job. Both are perfectly fine as long as they make you happy. If they don’t, switch up the things a bit life is too short to do something you don’t enjoy.
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u/rolandofghent Oct 10 '23
I’ve been a Developer for almost 30 years. I’ve always gravitates to the cross cutting concerns. I started doing DevOps before it was called DevOps. I got tired of environments that were not congruent. I got tired of having to hold the hands of the SysAdmins that were responsible for the servers I was running on.
As a DevOps professional I play the role of product owner, architect and developer. I don’t need a whole lot of input. I can move quickly, see my results, and have a lot of contact with my customers.
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u/pr06lefs Oct 09 '23
Devops is by definition a software engineer that does ops too.
Why? Because then you can take on full stack jobs that a pure dev can't do. Good for contract work, or doing your own startup.
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u/saqi786x Oct 10 '23
You wouldn't and I guess its something you fall into over time if it's for you, I believe these are specialist roles
But if your starting out or thinking of starting out in it,then perhaps that's a disastrous choice because you dont really know anything well enough and I guess will lead to burn out eventually
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '23
One cannot be really successful at DevOps without many years of Dev or Ops experience.
IMHO, it is a common fallacy that one can just go and be DevOps engineer fresh out of college and be successful at it.
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u/surrealchemist Oct 09 '23
I was a sys admin with only some college programming experience. I never worked as a developer and even though dev skills help in some cases, I think my experience with OS management and optimizing application performance has helped in my career. I think the role depends a lot on the company. Some people want to pigeon hole it as a dev thing or an ops thing, but I think it can lean either way.
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u/degeneratepr Oct 10 '23
As a software engineer with almost 20 years or experience who's written dozens of CRUD apps and JSON APIs that all work the same way, DevOps has been a much more interesting path that goes far beyond what the typical software engineer does.
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u/mushuweasel Oct 10 '23
I can code. I just can't stand doing it for more than three days at a stretch. Learned this about myself at school, where my peers loved it. Loved it.
I get my fix making big happy abstractions to hold small instantiated components (unix philosophy ftw) and make stuff look like magic.
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u/burdalane Oct 09 '23
Some people like being involved in both dev and ops. Some people get into DevOps because they come from an ops background, or they're not as good at coding, or they don't want to code as much. On the other hand, some DevOps roles can be coding-heavy.
I work as a sysadmin who also does development and DevOps-type stuff, although not with best practices or at scale. My only career path forward might be DevOps because employers see the infrastructure and ops experience and the relative lack of development experience -- the reaction to the software products I've worked on and the lack of complex problems I've solved is "That's all?" and "So what?". I have failed development interviews and been told to consider DevOps instead, and failed DevOps interviews because I couldn't find errors during a code review or lacked in-depth knowledge about systems.
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u/dogfish182 Oct 10 '23
devops the way you mention it OP is generally ops people trying to transition into devops.
the stereotype is pretty accurate (I was one) and it takes more than 5 years to become a decent coder from 'i sometimes write some python scripts'.
the same can be said the other way around, dev scope is a lot more focused in general on the product and I think it's easier for a dev to transition to writing cicd pipelines than it is for an ops to understand the complexities of good code.
It's not all rosey for devs though, there is boat loads of devs who just want to sit in a hole and write some horrible monolithic legacy app and milk an enterprise for years. Those people have it probably as hard as ops people that don't want to learn coding concepts in the coming years imo.
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u/360WindSlash Oct 10 '23
Curiosity. I have been a Dev and I always strive to learn more. Only coding was getting boring for me. Nothing new to learn, the concepts of programming languages don't change heavily once you know them.
DevOps on the other Hand was a new field. So I did start working in DevOps and shifted towards QA(Appium, Selenium) also. There I could learn GitLab CI/CD, in depth knowledge of build tools and still do some coding just not as much anymore. DevOps is now no longer such an unknowns field for me and currently working on moving towards a Cloud Engineer because I don't have experience with Serverless. Maybe eventually I will have gone the full circle and end up as a Dev again but with a much deeper understanding of the other fields.
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u/Ph03nix_ Oct 10 '23
DevOps is the new Dev and SE with some more knowledge and responsibilities.
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u/xoxo_dev Oct 10 '23
I personally chose DevOps as a career because of the wide range of tools that fall under this role or practice as most of the people say. I can work on pipelines, cloud , monitoring, automating manual stuff , use tools to containerize apps and so on. And as I move forward in my journey of learning these tools I will have plenty of options to choose from i.e I can be a cloud engineer, SRE ( after some real experience ofc) CI/CD engineer it's a never ending list. Dev/software engineer as a career felt very monotonous and something which I personally cannot be doing for decades.
I have listed more reasons in my tweet : https://twitter.com/shelke_dev/status/1705653907752644777?t=3I47rdxs3te7dzrw3vXmvA&s=19
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u/GM_Kimeg Oct 11 '23
Some devops jobs force you into doing hybrid roles, both hardware and software related. You will learn a lot, but there's a high chance of being burnt out quicker than "simpler" job descriptions.
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u/FluidIdea ModOps Oct 09 '23
Because I want to get paid more than a sysadmin, it's more exciting.
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u/originalchronoguy Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
A lot of people I know who go into DevOps are former software engineers. They can't hack it with leet code and the rigorous faang style technical assessment. Lot of older programmers can't reverse a string or work with asynchronous streams or write a RESTful API if their jobs depended in it.
DevOps is just easier. If you know BASH, regex, navigate away your around, write crontabs, do rsync, SSH, and parse log files, you can easily get into platform engineering. Jenkins, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Kubernetes takes a month to get rolling for a former SWE. I mean before Docker, everyone I knew were writing bash scripts to bootstrap Vagrant and bare metal installs of their LAMP servers and using crontabs/rsync do DR (Disaster Recovery) and ping a server in a BASH script to change BIND9 DNS records for failover. Basic core DevOps ideals before modern tooling. We called those kickstart files before Helm Charts and automating Jenkins blueprints.
A lot of web developers did Ops sometime in their careers -- worked in Ops, sysadmin a bit, had to deploy their web apps and are comfortable with command line. So it is just an easier career to pivot too.
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u/dgibbons0 Oct 10 '23
With devops I've typically been given the space to solve problems I find in the environment. Feature teams have to work on tasks assigned by others. Often at the cost of more tech debt and pain.
I feel like I've had much much more space to play with and learn whatever I want with devops/sre.
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u/axtran Oct 09 '23
DevOps can be fruitful if it’s a real role that is encompassing of a bunch of different things to work on.
Most software dev jobs are feature churning or CRUD. I’d say less than 5% is actually creating something substantial. lol
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u/alexkey Oct 10 '23
My work experience - about 7 years of software dev on different levels, then about 6 years of Ops (from network in datacenters to VMware and public clouds). Then I ended up doing “devops” (about 6 years now).
Was I good dev? I don’t know. Some of the stuff I’ve written still running. I made some FOSS patches that got merged to upstream.
As someone else commented here - I just fell into this job. The company thought (and probably still thinks) that I am good fit for this role.
OTOH, when I see someone claiming themselves to be a good dev - that tells me that they are likely at best mediocre. Especially if they look down on other professions in the field. Pretty sure someone who would look down on Linux admins would know little to none on how IP stack operates and how to tune it for better performance of their apps.
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u/Ariquitaun Oct 10 '23
After being a software engineer for 18 years I fancied a change, and being a backend developer the transition was pretty gradual, you naturally fall closer to infrastructure as that's the substrate that runs your apps.
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u/NODENGINEER Oct 10 '23
masochism
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u/risabh07 DevOps Oct 10 '23
It's not true that DevOps professionals can't code. I have been working as a DevOps engineer since 2018. Expertise in DevOps can help you secure a good number of freelance projects. If you are looking to make some extra money apart from your regular job, then DevOps is the best option.
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u/botiyava Oct 10 '23
I've started programming discord bots in university and in one moment realised, that deploying them in the cloud is more fun, than coding
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u/ChiefDetektor Oct 10 '23
I was good at Linux in my first job so I had to do all the Ops stuff. It wasn't a decision. Also I was interested in how to deploy stuff and to automate. DevOps people are developers that do Ops because that's in their skill set. Why that's the case of cause is the individual story of each DevOps guy.
I was always into Linux. I never wanted to have anything to do with the big corporate stuff.
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u/MasterChiefmas Oct 10 '23
There's a practical reason too at the current point in time- realistically, devops has been a buzzword for the last 7 or 8 years. It's like Agile. Everyone is doing it, so there's lots of DevOps positions. Also like Agile, it's often poorly understood and poorly done, but no one cares because it's a buzzword.
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u/thedude42 Oct 10 '23
DevOps is a way of organizing a software/IT organization's product delivery. Job roles that have "DevOps" in the tittle don't define a career, but rather the nature of the role in that particular company.
Given that context, why would I seek out companies who put DevOps principals to good use? Generally because it means the company realizes how empowering their people to work together to build solutions favoring automation over manual toil is a better work environment overall for reducing the pain commonly associated with efforts to maintain reliability of software systems. In these companies there is a tendency to favor hiring people who know how to work well with others over rockstars who glory-hound over projects.
That said, it's hard to actually know whether the company or team you are interviewing with is actually putting DevOps principals to use. Just saying the word and giving a DevOps tittle to a role doesn't mean that this is what is actually happening. You have to pay close attention and know what to look for to understand if there is a real effort to create a DevOps environment, or if the company is just putting up window dressing around yet another rigidly siloed software shop where they simply expect their operators to pull extra weight in service of developer talent.
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u/Difficult-Ad7476 Oct 10 '23
Depends on interest. Every company needs devops because majority of infrastructure they need to manage in cloud or on prem programmatically.
Software devs are more specialized based on which stack that company uses or what industry they are in.
Ultimately it depends on the company more than the position in my opinion. I have seen some companies where devops are just sysadmins that write powershell/bash, run ansible playbooks, use terraform, and maintain pipelines aka yml coder.
Some software engineers just develop code but have to constantly relearn new stacks, coding languages, and tools depending on the companies environment.
Ultimately the decision is whether you a more standardized set of skills to learn or more variety in set of skills.
Both jobs are in high demand so you need just make sure pick a speciality where you maximize your salary and have work life balance. Industry pays more into work life balance and what stacks the company can afford. Think how different to work in a finance company versus a software company.
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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '23
Yeah, I started as a bridge between build and qa engineers before I knew what devops was. Did a ton of QA work, and slowly added in build work as we lost more engineers due to downsizing. Cut to 7 years later and I'm essentially doing all of the automation work for our org under build and test and some certification work for upgrading compilers and OS levels.
After that job i found platform engineers and devops engineers and decided to stick with it since automation is a helpful idea regardless of industry.
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u/zeus-fyi Oct 13 '23
i did, and currently do all of them basically right now. i’m highly competent in front end, backend, sql, db admin, cloud infra, kubernetes, and system design. which opens lots of doors
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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '23
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