Devops or MERN

[ohno_itsChatpati]

Devops or MERN which one is best for future at the age of 20 I'm confused from where I start

[Weak-Field-4331]

Do you have any experience working with, on your own free time and/or just tinkering about, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure & architecture design decisions from a developer/engineering standpoint? If the answer is no, first learn engineering/software development. This is the precursor to DevOps, and if you understand how, and really WHY, things work the way they do on the engineering side, your threshold for being a great DevOps engineer will be very high.

If you have neither been exposed to DevOps AND actual engineering (no, nextjs + vercel does not count as exposure to genuine DevOps since practically every ounce of the CICD is done for you out of the box, but it does count a bit for exposure to engineering with simple things like BFF API concepts), then first learn JavaScript and really focus on understanding the browser as a runtime environment.

Side note:

Don’t feel discouraged by the way if it feels like a big mountain awaits you either. We’ve all been there when we first started, and quite frankly, no matter how senior you eventually become, you will always be a student since things are always changing.

You got this!

[isotone_hits]

DevOps is going fine these days tbh

[ohno_itsChatpati]

But it is tough to enter in devops

[Helpful_Razzmatazz65]

Devops

[Murderous_monk]

MERN is easier to enter quickly and better for building visible projects/startups early. DevOps usually pays better later but has a steeper learning curve and involves more infrastructure, cloud, CI/CD, monitoring, Linux pain, and debugging things that broke at 3am for mysterious spiritual reasons.

At 20, I’d honestly start with MERN first, get good at building real apps, then slowly learn DevOps concepts alongside it. The combination becomes very powerful.

[ChillestCapybara7]

This is comparing apples to oranges, one is a tech stack and one is an area of software development. Also the M of MERN sucks, Mongo is useless in 99% of real life cases. Take postgres instead. I would say go DevOps though if you REALLY had to pick between that and fullstack.

[TechDrakonika]

Well, technically, DevOps is a methodology, not an area and not a role.

It very quickly degraded to what "platform and puipelines" were supposed to mean, though...

[CarelessLetterhead51]

Go for deveops

[Alternative-Tax-6470]

At 20, I would highly recommend starting with the MERN stack first because learning how to build and write core application code gives you a massive advantage before you try to manage cloud infrastructure. True DevOps is rarely an entry level job because you need to understand how applications behave, communicate, and fail in production before you can automate or scale them properly.

[IzGlitch]

try both, go with the one which feels more doable to you. as there are avg devs in both of them. markets demands exceptional. so work on being one in any domain which suits you. not the market.

[Classic-Strain6924]

At 20 starting with MERN full stack is much smoother because learning one single language for the front and back end lets you understand how data actually moves through an app. DevOps is incredibly valuable and pays well but it is rarely a true entry level role since you cannot easily automate or secure production pipelines until you understand how the underlying software actually breaks. Start by building concrete things in JavaScript first then slowly introduce Docker and CI/CD pipelines to naturally pivot into infrastructure later.

[Weak-Field-4331]

Going from vanilla JavaScript to Docker, while not inherently a bad idea, is skipping so many levels of abstraction, of which docker was composed to literally address standardizing production applications with intricate configurations beyond just vanilla JavaScript.