Wanted to work on some distributed database systems like GCP Spanner, AWS DynamoDB etc. and thinking to apply to some of these positions. However, what is the future scope after working in those teams for few years? Is it easy to switch back to generic SDE? (I think generic SDE makes more money)
You're probably mixing web/app development work with cloud. Cloud isn't there to make pretty websites or apps. It's there to handle the back end infrastructure behind those pretty websites and apps. Your offer from Aurora is still in the scope of an SDE. You might not be used to it since you work at CK (not undermining CK - just different work) To answer your question, yes there is tons of scope. DynamoDB and GCP Spanner aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Idk what you mean by 'generic SDE', but I assure you that the engineers behind these products are well compensated and are working on challenging business problems.
Thanks 🙂 By generic SDE I meant CRUD, make GraphQL or REST API, expose endpoint, FE calls it, backend looks to db or does some transformation and calls multiple APIs, sends a response back. Deploy it with CI/CD and call it a day. System level engineers like in Aurora, DynamoDB, Spanner work on things like storage, replication, cache, quorum, transactions etc. I meant can you move from writing distributed systems to CRUD after few years or HMs would not consider you for such position and I am stuck with niche skills and limited job opportunities is what I meant. Sorry for being naive but I am early in my career and wanted a perspective. Read on blind like going from product to infra is easy but infra to product is difficult. You already work at Amazon so you might be good person to answer this if I can change to CRUD teams calling high level APIs in future easily or not? Thanks. Hope my question makes sense
Also, if you think filling in web forms by parsing JSON from calling DBs/APIs is what a 'generic' SWE does, you're in for a big surprise 😂
There is definitely scope for people with those skills. But most business needs are building curd applications. You can check out production engineer, sre , system dev roles. But all of them involve being oncall .
But my question is can I switch teams that build CRUD apps later? Specially at Amazon itself? I don't want to be an SRE or PE. I want to stay at my current title SDE.
If you're good you'll make much more money as a systems developer. That is a much rarer and more valuable skill set...
What makes you think people working on those products are not generic SDE?
They deal with distributed systems, indexing, replication etc. Those things are challenging but not something a generic SDE does (solve business problems). How hesitant are teams to consider for generic SDE role? Generic SDE uses DynamoDB to solve business problems, he/she doesn't know much detail on how it scales!
You seem to be misguided. We definitely solve business problems. You think these teams work in silos and have no understanding of what the market requires?