How much Ops work do SWE's do?

Jan 4, 2019 8 Comments

As a SWE, how much Operations and support work do you do as part of your overall work load? Please only vote if you're a SWE and not SRE, PE, DevOps, etc as those roles usually have much more Ops.

Would be helpful to comment your company, percentage of Ops work, and what area you work in (full-stack, backend, infra, etc)

I'll start. Currently at FB on a product team doing full-stack work. Don't have any Ops work.

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TOP 8 Comments
  • Google
    huu

    Go to company page Google

    huu
    What’s ops work? Oncall?
    Jan 4, 2019 1
    • Airbnb
      Dxtg

      Go to company page Airbnb

      Dxtg
      Building packages, assembling deployment pipelines, orchestrating/managing deployments, db/system administration, trouble shooting customer issues, configuration management. Usually stuff that doesn't directly involve designing or writing software
      Jan 4, 2019
  • Google
    ovBk62

    Go to company page Google

    ovBk62
    20% or so. I work in a core infra team. I think it is an amazing learning experience if you work on more end to end things rather than just writing a class and checking it in and forgetting about it.

    It also carries over better to other jobs/teams.
    Jan 4, 2019 2
    • OP
      Thanks for sharing. Do most infra teams at Google have a similar ops load?

      Also, are there any parts of your ops work that you think aren't good for learning/experience and would rather live without?
      Jan 4, 2019
    • Google
      ovBk62

      Go to company page Google

      ovBk62
      I think most grunt work can be automated through scripts and is a great opportunity to show impact and initiative, especially at lower levels.

      Ops load depends on which stage of product cycle you're in. Early on, it is a lot. At the very mature stage, there is minimal since SREs take over and need minimal support from the dev team.
      Jan 4, 2019
  • It's team dependant. I'm a senior developer in azure and about 1 week every month I have to do ops.

    I know folks in Bing who haven't had to resolve a single on-site issue in over a year
    Jan 4, 2019 1
    • OP
      Outside of your on-call rotation how often do you do things like:

      Building packages, assembling deployment pipelines, orchestrating/managing deployments, db/system administration, trouble shooting customer issues, configuration management. Usually stuff that doesn't directly involve designing or writing software
      Jan 4, 2019
  • Microsoft / Eng
    Arye

    Go to company page Microsoft Eng

    Arye
    i'd say 15-20%
    Jan 5, 2019 0