Is devops/sre a good career path when compared to SDE? What are the future prospects in the long run?
I have been working on AWS for a few months right out of college, I see my career trajectory moving towards devops/sre roles given my background. But is it a right choice? I actually like those role, but not a fan of being oncall. What is the future of these roles? Can I make a long term career out of it? Or should I take the safer SDE career path? Given that devops/sres job is automating their own jobs
I manage a large team of mixed devops and development engineers. The prevalence of devops engineers (in this case, people who do mostly configuration and management, some scripting, but not building apps from the ground up) is problematic for us, as these folks are limited in their career trajectory. Without moving them towards a coding path, it's hard to justify promotions beyond the application engineer 2 level. On the other hand, an sde can grow to principal level (or more!), has a clear value across multiple companies,and can do devops work when called to do so. So, following an SDE path is a much better route if you have the aptitude.
But given that I have decent coding skills and above average system design skills, can I switch to software architect roles? I prefer to stay away from SDE roles because I'm not a fan of front-end/mobile dev . I like backend but I don't want to just design CURD apps. In devops I take care of ci/cd , infra, dB, cdn,dns , security, scaling etc. I've made basic webapps in the past but it got monotonous after a while. Do I have a wrong understanding of SDE role?
This is a very interesting perspective. I somehow feel you could be valued higher but only if you are devops + project. Which means you're delivering something end to end. For that you will need the right kind of company and place.
Career wise, DevOps is just that. Think SDE as career in the police academy. You have the opportunity to to climb up the ladder and be the police chief someday if you showcase the right mix of capability and brown nosing. On the other hand, SREs are like mall cops. You may become the head of security for Macyβs but you are still the head of security for mall cops π
I disagree. SRE is probably a dead end but the trend in the industry is for every developer to be DevOps in some capacity. I actually see a future where we will all have to be full stack devops and our own QE as well.intefacing between all the roles takes up too many development cycles so the more you layer on a single developer the better.
DevOps is only the modern word for it, but DevOps has always been in a sr/principal level sde skill set. You need to know what kind of database, you need to know where to store static content, how to reduce latency from geographical latency. When you plan the base design you are taking all aspects you can think of into consideration. Software engineers do way more than just plaster code into a mold, they shape the mold.
Sober up!
Wah!! SRE is NOT a senior or principal level job. Itβs a job for people who did not make the cut as successful engineers but did not wanted to end up as SDETs either. Like I said above, a Mall Cop.
Ironically, I currently work for a consulting shop of DevOps Automation Engineers, but I'm not a fan of DevOps as a target role type, esp right out of the gate in a career. If you don't have a strong foundation in Dev and real experience with Ops / Infrastructure, you're likely just automation scripting and using tools (complicated tools, but most TeamCity admin users can't explain what a basic directed acyclical graph is). Cloud has drastically lowered the Ops side barriers, but you aren't going to be able to act as a resource who drastically shifts a dev team towards testing best practices or understanding how to get past the "works on my laptop" mindset while also building a, secure, scalable, monitored architecture. Highly technical, hands on leaders who have real experience significantly improving dev practices and environments for teams they were responsible for make for good "DevOps". I feel that SDE is a better career starting point if you enjoy coding.
Devops is methodology. Career wise SRE is the same as SWE.
SRE is not well defined in the industry. For example half of Google SREs are SWEs..
If you're talking about Systems Development this is much harder to hire for than SDE. It's a great path to follow.
I'm in a similar boat right now. Been in sre DevOps field straight out of college. While knowledge of ops and infra aspects is important, I feel it's also important to know dev side of the story. What I plan/wish to do is do dev job also for couple years to get the taste of that side. That way, you know more part of the stack.
Sde better