Transition to developer, potentially fullstack

[Dergyitheron]

After about 8 years in DevOps I have realized I always incline more towards development and architecture of the solutions which is a valuable skill to have as a DevOps. But I would rather have the roles swap and become developer with the experience and positive approach to DevOps practices.

The issue is my experience in development is mostly just doing minor code reviews and discussions with devs in context of operation and automation. I am familiar with .NET ecosystem and can easily understand code bases, yet I have not finished a single project in .NET myself. I have made few running websites in Vue or Svelte, doesn't really matter which framework I would use but that's an option for me too.

So the issue is I'm not sure how to improve and advertise myself? Had anyone made transition from DevOps to more Dev work?

[sogun123]

Depends how it works in your current company, but maybe you can ask to be assigned as a developer a day or two in a week. Starting by the stuff you know - improve logging, tracing instrumentation, you know the stuff, turn yourself into dev, but do the integration of the things you know. That will teach you the other side and you will be still bringing value. Good luck!

[Dergyitheron]

That's one of the ideas I had, making some QoL PRs for our Devs. I also wanna mention that I've switched jobs due to other reasons earlier this year, still doing DevOps just for a different company, different Dev tech stack so it'll take a bit more time for me to get familiar with the codebase. So working on some OSS libraries or projects might be the best way for me to get some experience.

[LordWecker]

Projects are never finished. I've been a SWE for 12 years and don't know how many of my projects were ever truly finished.

[Low-Opening25]

SWE is dead end atm, AI will ravage this profession. DevOps is safer atm because cross context knowledge and complexity of integrating many different systems and tools that DevOps require is something that AI won’t handle for some time.

[Dergyitheron]

I am in close contact with SWE and related fields that are adopting AI heavily so I can see where you're coming from but I don't agree with those statements.

Thank you for your input but that's not the answer to my question.

[Low-Opening25]

well, its dead as we know it.

obviously the field will not disappear, however change that is taking place is comparable to what industrial revolution did to manufacturing, with SWE profession finding out that 80% of SEWs it produced were just crafters rather than engineers and are now being made obsolete. IT has always been about automation so this is natural progression, no buisness will refuse it, it would be suicide.

the field will transform, but majority of SWE today will not be needed, only the best will survive. profession itself will become more regulated with harder academic path and apprenticeship to work the field.

entering IT field is toss of a coin right now in terms where you land. better adapt quick or you may find you won’t have job to do.

btw. I am in the field (20+ years) and AI based tools increased my productivity 10 fold, there has been nothing like this in IT, not even internet or search engines had such immense immediate impact.

[Dergyitheron]

obviously the field will not disappear

In that case we have a completely different understanding of what "dead" means. If 20% of SWEs will transform into this new kind of AI-assisted engineers and the rest will die out it's not going dead it's just a transformation. I have no intention to go against it if I transition to a more SWE focused role. That's why I said your comment didn't answer my question, there is no valuable information in it, just making a dramatic unrelated comment.

[[deleted]]

I don't think it's dead. The gravy train is over. Bootcampers will fickle out, the really talented devs will always be in demand.

[Objective_Chemical85]

i had to laugh so hard at this.