3 ms·

I'm surprised recently, just how many job offers and what compensation my devops friend is getting (he's been a devops for almost a year... before that he was t

I'm surprised recently, just how many job offers and what compensation my devops friend is getting (he's been a devops for almost a year... before that he was tech support, very basic technical knowledge becomes he comes from outside tech). My senior full stack developer LinkedIN requests are pretty low volume for some months now, while he gets flooded with offers with compensation more than most senior devs I know. His skill set is also (and I love the guy dearly, I'm trying to be objective and he also feels this way) maybe 1 / 5 of what a senior dev has. Basically he's "I’d wager most of what they are doing is using Terraform and YAML to do menial tasks for the engineering team."

heinrichhartman 3y ago
If this is true, why are you not moving into "DevOps" roles as well?
- adammarples 3y ago
  Because who wants to be a yaml engineer
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  It is true. People hire astoundingly incompetent devops all the time. I’ve seen it throughout my career. An issue is most hiring managers and CTO’s also don’t have a devops background, so it’s trivially easy for people to get into situations where they can BS some buzzwords and googled regurgitated definitions like CI/CD and it’s like “welp you know what you’re talking about.” It’s highly compensated because it’s very needed. A low low % of operations engineers are as good as they need to be. It’s not even always the organization’s or the engineers’ fault, either, as the author of this blog alludes to.
- kachnuv_ocasek 3y ago
  Because no amount of money can compensate for the soul-sucking pain of being a YAML engineer.
- tirpen 3y ago
  Do you base all your decisions about life on a pure money maximizing algorithm? Picking a horrible position just because of a better salary is a great way to live an unhappy life.
  - mm007emko 3y ago
    I have a shit job (Python DevOps in tel. co. industry). No problem with that. Previous job was in applied research. Very interesting, unfortunately the work conditions and compensation were much worse than my present-day shitshow. Life is not only about work, I have to work to be able to pay my mortgage and to enjoy other activities. Having happy or unhappy life, for people in the IT industry, is mostly about their mindset.
    - Detrytus 3y ago
      If that lifestyle suits you, sure, go for it. However, by staying in a shit job you are throwing half of your waking hours away. I know this is not an option for everyone, but if one can make enough money from the thing that one enjoy that's like getting half of your life back.
- awesomeMilou 3y ago
  Because the work conditions outside FAANG are garbage, no one that has any regard for their own well-being would get into it. So far everyone I have met that works in infra was in horrible shape, often from stress-related eating disorders and lack of physical exercise.
  - ThalesX 3y ago
    My friend works outside of FAANG, in Europe, and the DevOps department is super chill.
- ThalesX 3y ago
  This question is strange honestly... Because I have a career in software development and I really enjoy doing it? If I wouldn't be in this situation, maybe I would consider doing the switch based on what I've seen.
ineedausername 3y ago
True only to some extent, the knowledge you need to be a competent devops is huge and i think most techies prefer dev route though i don't know the stats.
awesomeMilou 3y ago
The issue lies exactly with the menial tasks. Ever used Ansible? It's hell. Not because it's hard, but because there's basicially no debugging and so much hidden state. You're lucky if you can use Terraform, but that's not the default. Depending on the stack, DevOps is mainly just trial and error, "getting shit to work", which depending on the Software used can take a while. And then being responsible for the part of infra you got working, which may necessitate unpaid overtime in case of an outage. EDIT: One thing I forgot is, that in order to be really good at DevOps, you need to know your stack _really_ well, which imo necessitates that you spent at least some time on the development side of things. This goes against every hiring managers instinct though, as people should only specialize in one thing and do it well (at least where I live).
- nailer 3y ago
  > You're lucky if you can use Terraform, but that's not the default. Oh god I thought that was unlucky. I have huge respect for Terraform for popularising what they call “infra as code” (we used to just do this with the actual AWS API) but now there’s multiple modern IaCs that use actual code with real tooling.
  - shyn3 3y ago
    What's your favourite?
    - nailer 3y ago
      I still like the flexibility of the raw AWS API, but now days CDK and Bicep for anything more complex. I really wanted to like Pulumi but it had a lot of odd bugs and leaky abstractions a couple of years ago when I got into it, it’s probably improved since then.
  - awesomeMilou 3y ago
    IaC was popular before Terraform, it's just the first tool that really made it easy to use. Unfortunately you can't make use of it outside of $BigCloud, because it needs common and well established API's to run. If your employer self-hosts, you're either stuck with Ansible or you host OpenStack yourself (which is just a surrogate $BigCloud, since you'll likely employ the services of RedHat to manage it).
rajamaka 3y ago
As a former DevOps who has moved into SWE, I completely agree. One consolation I might put forward is that there's a larger breadth of knowledge with much less depth when the two are compared.
jstx1 3y ago
There's lots of moving parts, some systems are very complex and it's a space where experience is worth a lot - it's hard to get started with ops 101 just by yourself like you can do with frontend web development for example.
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
As someone who transitioned from a DevOps role to a Security Engineer role, the thought of going back gives me anxiety. Having my "log light" turn red at 2am? No thanks. It's not like it woke me up or anything, I'm always awake at 2am, I just don't want to deal with servers at 2am. I'd rather get a good night of sleep and go in the next day and destroy all of the hard work that the DevOps team spent so much time working on. That's a much better fit for me. I wouldn't take a DevOps job even if it paid $50k more than what I'm making now. I just wouldn't enjoy the work. That isn't to say that I'm unwilling to help the DevOps team (I help them all the time by hacking their shit), but I wouldn't actually want to be them again.

heinrichhartman 3y ago

If this is true, why are you not moving into "DevOps" roles as well?

adammarples 3y ago
Because who wants to be a yaml engineer
JohnMakin 3y ago
It is true. People hire astoundingly incompetent devops all the time. I’ve seen it throughout my career. An issue is most hiring managers and CTO’s also don’t have a devops background, so it’s trivially easy for people to get into situations where they can BS some buzzwords and googled regurgitated definitions like CI/CD and it’s like “welp you know what you’re talking about.” It’s highly compensated because it’s very needed. A low low % of operations engineers are as good as they need to be. It’s not even always the organization’s or the engineers’ fault, either, as the author of this blog alludes to.
kachnuv_ocasek 3y ago
Because no amount of money can compensate for the soul-sucking pain of being a YAML engineer.
tirpen 3y ago
Do you base all your decisions about life on a pure money maximizing algorithm? Picking a horrible position just because of a better salary is a great way to live an unhappy life.
- mm007emko 3y ago
  I have a shit job (Python DevOps in tel. co. industry). No problem with that. Previous job was in applied research. Very interesting, unfortunately the work conditions and compensation were much worse than my present-day shitshow. Life is not only about work, I have to work to be able to pay my mortgage and to enjoy other activities. Having happy or unhappy life, for people in the IT industry, is mostly about their mindset.
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    If that lifestyle suits you, sure, go for it. However, by staying in a shit job you are throwing half of your waking hours away. I know this is not an option for everyone, but if one can make enough money from the thing that one enjoy that's like getting half of your life back.
awesomeMilou 3y ago
Because the work conditions outside FAANG are garbage, no one that has any regard for their own well-being would get into it. So far everyone I have met that works in infra was in horrible shape, often from stress-related eating disorders and lack of physical exercise.
- ThalesX 3y ago
  My friend works outside of FAANG, in Europe, and the DevOps department is super chill.
ThalesX 3y ago
This question is strange honestly... Because I have a career in software development and I really enjoy doing it? If I wouldn't be in this situation, maybe I would consider doing the switch based on what I've seen.

ineedausername 3y ago

True only to some extent, the knowledge you need to be a competent devops is huge and i think most techies prefer dev route though i don't know the stats.

awesomeMilou 3y ago

The issue lies exactly with the menial tasks. Ever used Ansible? It's hell. Not because it's hard, but because there's basicially no debugging and so much hidden state. You're lucky if you can use Terraform, but that's not the default. Depending on the stack, DevOps is mainly just trial and error, "getting shit to work", which depending on the Software used can take a while. And then being responsible for the part of infra you got working, which may necessitate unpaid overtime in case of an outage. EDIT: One thing I forgot is, that in order to be really good at DevOps, you need to know your stack _really_ well, which imo necessitates that you spent at least some time on the development side of things. This goes against every hiring managers instinct though, as people should only specialize in one thing and do it well (at least where I live).

nailer 3y ago
> You're lucky if you can use Terraform, but that's not the default. Oh god I thought that was unlucky. I have huge respect for Terraform for popularising what they call “infra as code” (we used to just do this with the actual AWS API) but now there’s multiple modern IaCs that use actual code with real tooling.
- shyn3 3y ago
  What's your favourite?
  - nailer 3y ago
    I still like the flexibility of the raw AWS API, but now days CDK and Bicep for anything more complex. I really wanted to like Pulumi but it had a lot of odd bugs and leaky abstractions a couple of years ago when I got into it, it’s probably improved since then.
- awesomeMilou 3y ago
  IaC was popular before Terraform, it's just the first tool that really made it easy to use. Unfortunately you can't make use of it outside of $BigCloud, because it needs common and well established API's to run. If your employer self-hosts, you're either stuck with Ansible or you host OpenStack yourself (which is just a surrogate $BigCloud, since you'll likely employ the services of RedHat to manage it).

rajamaka 3y ago

As a former DevOps who has moved into SWE, I completely agree. One consolation I might put forward is that there's a larger breadth of knowledge with much less depth when the two are compared.

jstx1 3y ago

There's lots of moving parts, some systems are very complex and it's a space where experience is worth a lot - it's hard to get started with ops 101 just by yourself like you can do with frontend web development for example.

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

As someone who transitioned from a DevOps role to a Security Engineer role, the thought of going back gives me anxiety. Having my "log light" turn red at 2am? No thanks. It's not like it woke me up or anything, I'm always awake at 2am, I just don't want to deal with servers at 2am. I'd rather get a good night of sleep and go in the next day and destroy all of the hard work that the DevOps team spent so much time working on. That's a much better fit for me. I wouldn't take a DevOps job even if it paid $50k more than what I'm making now. I just wouldn't enjoy the work. That isn't to say that I'm unwilling to help the DevOps team (I help them all the time by hacking their shit), but I wouldn't actually want to be them again.