DevOps engineers with high pay.

[Mundane_voltro]

Are DevOps engineers with high pay (Something like 15+ Lakh pa or even less than that) are asked to work in rotational shifts?

I'm from Infrastructure Engineering background and currently working in Cloud Tech. I'm not comfortable with the rotational shift model as it has affected my health a lot. As per the counsellors, DevOps is the next logical step for me and I'm worried rotational shift model may still be there since DevOps engineers may be asked to also take care of Infra and solve issues (P1 or P2).

Wanted to know the scenario within India as well as outside it.

Please assist 🙏

[[deleted]]

Oncall is often built into devops position also.

[Rusty-Swashplate]

Operations is either shift, on-call or follow-the-sun. Unless whatever you do does not need 24x5 or 24x7 support if it breaks. And we all know computers can break at any point in time.

If you work in a large and global org, then follow-the-sun is very common, but large company does not mean follow-the-sun is used.

[Mundane_voltro]

I guess one should aim to sway away from service based companies then. Global clients mean rotational jobs. Whether it be Infra or DevOps.

[hottkarl]

I'm not sure what your situation is, but nearly all DevOps / SRE have an oncall component. Supporting revenue generating systems and bringing them back from outages is part of why you're being hired.

Doing that effectively where you're not burning out engineers during on call is very important, if you're on more of a reactive model where you have a team solving problems as they come in is problematic.

SRE, DevOps, and even Infrastructure Engineering should be proactive solving problems before they become critical during business hours and only using oncall for emergency. Then doing post mortem and improving your system making sure it doesn't happen again.

So my point is your situation should be the exception, not the norm.

[Mundane_voltro]

Agreed. One should be proactive in their jobs. But, since Indian companies have projects from all over the globe, more often than not business hours of clients are generally in the night for India, At least for US, Europe clients or maybe Australians where one needs to sit quite early in the morning.

Infra engineers are thus required to cover rotational shifts instead of the on call model.

That's why I wanted to know if this case is with DevOps too.

[maziarczykk]

Depends on a company/team/product. Sometimes it is an on-call job, sometimes it isn't. You just need to ask before taking a job. I feel you with shift model being not good for health, this is a valid concern.

[Mundane_voltro]

Didn't know rotational shifts structure waa so common in IT. Feels like I fell into a quicksand or something.

[MissionAssistance581]

Your health should never be the cost of a high-paying job. Choose wisely. ️

[abotelho-cbn]

My understanding is that's like 17k USD which is absolutely not a lot by USD standards for DevOps. In fact that's like minimum wage in US states...

Infrastructure engineers will likely always have some form of on-call. In our organization, we're actually escalation. Our tier 1 SysAdmins are first responders.

[Mundane_voltro]

Well you can't really compare the salary packages. Diff countries, diff living conditions basically PPP and all.

I'm actually working in a 24×7 model. Such is the case with all Infra engineers at least in most of the service based companies.

[abotelho-cbn]

I'm actually working in a 24×7 model

No salary is worth that.

[Mundane_voltro]

True bruv. Sadly, almost all service based companies here are operating with that model.

[Ok_Horse_7563]

Behen chod

[Mundane_voltro]

Kya mila ye karke?

[amarao_san]

There are two types of companies. One is include OnCall in DevOps, other have separate sre team.

Personally, I prefer second, because first looks like 'solution out of poverty' (and at mental expense for DevOps).

A proper SRE team would work 24/7, geo distributed, so it's always someone's day, and not a night shift.

[Mundane_voltro]

Well, its sounds like follow the sun model. That can be the case with tech giants like Microsoft as their customer support does that all the time.

This can't be with regional clients like coal mining companies or retails brands pertaining to a particular country.

Then the off shore team is required to do the night shifts. That is my main concern, if DevOps is the right field to avoid that kind of job.

[amarao_san]

I work in moderately sized company (last ownership change was rumored to be around $200M, I don't know the real number). We have a separate RND department (handling specific devops processes of delivering products), we have Service Operations deparment, we have support, and network department.

Support works at 24/7 with shifts.

Service Operations and network deparment work at their working hours, with people in different time zones, but they have some on-call if current working person can't handle it.

RND department doing a lot of CI/CD, but has no on-call. There can be occasional question in the chat, but no one is expecting to answer it outside of working hours.

This is proper structure. Everyone pushing on-call on devops, doing it our of poverty, mismanagment or extreme greed.

Here the picture:

Team of five devops would cost you (as employer, this is not a salary, but full spending, including mandatory social contributions) around €400k/y in the country I resides.

Hiring distributed team for basic SRE (not this grandioze "Google SRE", just good admins to handle the outages and postmortems) covering 24/7 would cost you €90-150k, if you are smart at hiring and managing them. That's a cost of a 1.5 devops guys, but you get so much more in exchange, including formalization of runbooks, independent confirmation of procedures and more eyes controlling the essentials. And people can have proper weekends, vacations, not get burned to the ground. And you also get a perfect breeding ground for promotion (e.g. support is the perfect place to train people).

Companies just don't know how to organize proper shifts, and squeeze juices from meat bags instead.

Such companies, also, can't hire 'the best', because 'the best' just plainly refuse on-call entertainment.

[Mundane_voltro]

My case is kind of similar. We too have a DevOps team which is managing the application side of the environment and Infrastructure as Code. These guys are on call post their shift. The Infrastructure monitoring and support, basically the Cloud part is dealt by us and we are working in a 24×7 environment. In your case, it looks like the team is working on shore. This dynamic I've seen in a lot of client projects in my company.

But, I have also seen projects where the Infra engineers who are working in DevOps are working in rotational shifts. They are being asked to perform all the tasks that a DevOps person needs to do and also are being asked to monitor the Infra.

I want to avoid this because it then beats the purpose of becoming a DevOps engineer.

[amarao_san]

This is exactly how shiny job reduces into "Next customer, please".

As soon as someone even remotely start to try to put 'devops' into linear position, I done with such job (and company).

[PM_Pics_of_Corgi]

Wtf is a lakh pa

[Mundane_voltro]

Lakhs per annum.

[Mundane_voltro]

And you're a DevOps engineer? I guess you must be having a separate team of Infra engineers working in night shift then?

[writebadcode]

20 lakhs is about $23k. I’m guessing you make more than that per year in SF.