I’ve been a backend engineer for 2.5 years now, and all I’ve done is build generic backend business logic. How do I break out of this and learn some more deep technical knowledge, like Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc? Would I need to become a devops engineer? Should I move to a different company that specializes in this like Databricks or Confluent? Or try to find a specific team in Google, Facebook, or Amazon that deals with these kinds of things? Also to do this stuff should I look for devops roles, infrastructure engineering, or data engineering? Basically I’m sick of building backend for business logic and I want to work on stuff that requires more core systems knowledge. I’m pretty swamped at work as well so it hasn’t really been easy learning these things on my own, which is why I feel like I should just find a new job where I can work on this more interesting stuff full time. If I stay at my current team I don’t see a future where I can expand beyond CRUD apps. TC 285 yoe 2.5
You’re better off staying where you are now and make as much money as you can while you’re young. The market might not always be like this for SWE.. people are calling this the golden age and soon enough the field will be too saturated for everyone to be getting these crazy comps - embrace it while you can. Switching to Dev ops will definitely cut your pay no matter where you go
U believe this <3 yr 285K? if so Airbnb is just reckless, as if their biz depends on problems solved by paying junior devs 2x as much as other companies
Well, their business model imo is freaking genius
What school are you from ?
When I was non-FAANG I was working on all these technologies for a top consulting company since they needed all these pipelines to be built. Now I’m in FAANG and I read this and feel like I want to work on that stuff. Its always greener on the other side I don’t know whats the best path anymore. OP you can definitely get those kind of roles in smaller companies.
TC and YoE?
Keep that TC and Learn those things on your own. It Is not that hard to learn. A side project or two would be enough to understand general concepts
"learn those things on your own" - lol
Move to SRE team, but only if they do the real stuff. The hiring bar for sre is higher than swe though.
SRE would be an extreme case. OP doesn’t even know whether he’d like it or not. He is just fancying over the green grass on the other side
News flash, majority of SWE we hire are working on web app stuff we’re are a SaaS company afterall. The people working on the cool distributed stuff have a proven track record(open source spark/etc) or have been involved with the company for sometime OP you make double my salary be greatful
Additional note if I look at our custom/Databricks related spark code internally there is less then 8 people committing
Your TC/YOE ratio is high
Devops is a one time job, you set up the ci cd you are done. Infrastructure , setting up the data pipeline too. Once you have this, then you would maintain , support your internal teams kind of like tech support. If you working on product which is external customer facing, you’ll have a lot of visibility and also in term of job security, as there will always some ongoing requirements. As an engineer , yes one should be always curious on how stuff works.
Surprise surprise leetcode can not help you this time
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Why not internally transferring into one of the infra or platform teams? I’m sure they must be handling these problems at Airbnb
^this!
Yes do an internal transfer