First: don't think of the job as a "devops engineer". It's still a position for system administrator. You'll be working with operating system and maybe with har

First: don't think of the job as a "devops engineer". It's still a position for system administrator. You'll be working with operating system and maybe with hardware. Second: as a sysadmin you'll be expected to manage servers and services. Nobody will give a damn how you do that (except for fellow sysadmins), as long as you don't break anything (too much, too often). This means that nobody will give a damn what language and runtime you use to automate things. As a sysadmin that writes tools, which means a system programmer, except without the "programmer" title, you'll fly under radar in most organizations and you'll be free to choose any tool that does the job. I learned Erlang this way (I'm a sysadmin/system programmer myself). And me today? I get offers for programmers quite often, and if I was to go down this road, I probably could land somewhere; I don't know OOP design patterns or latest JavaScript framework by heart (I never learned them specifically), but I have many tools written and published and used to this day, so my programming-fu is quite strong. So yes, I think it may be a good move to take this job. It certainly was good for me ten years ago.