How much Ops work do SWE's do?
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.
What’s ops work? Oncall?
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
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.
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?
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.
i'd say 15-20%
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
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