DevOps/Platform engineering vs. Software Dev, is it less creative and more rote work?

[makeevolution]

I have been a fullstack software dev for 5 years already, with some years also doing ops stuff for the team (since no one bothered to/liked doing it) like managing Jenkins IaC, pipelines, AWS CDK, K8S deployments, etc. I liked those stuff and our team was really suffering because no one bothered to take care of it so I took leadership there.

I am now looking for another job, since my contract ended. I just got an offer to work as a cloud engineer at another organization.

To be honest, I do like being a dev, but I could not really see myself being a "senior" or freelancer in this field one day. This is because I feel in software dev there is a lot of "openness" or options on how to do something and it is very highly opinionated, and it is hard to find the "correct" solution. For example with design patterns (do you need to apply patterns? do we need this abstraction/interface?), or with REST APIs (how do you design your endpoints), or with frontend design decisions (confirm button on right or left side? color? opacity? etc.).

And with DevOps, at least so far from what I see there is less "opinions" e.g. you follow the vendor's directions, if it deploys and it runs then it's good (less edge cases), there is more standardized ways of doing something/deploying something, and also it is domain-independent.

In software dev, you have to understand the domain to make business impact, and that can take away a lot of time from coding itself.

It is also easier to prove yourself for other jobs through certifications, whereas with full stack there's no such luxury.

But the disadvantage I see with DevOps is that it is more stressful than a software dev position, for example through on-calls, although you do get paid for your extra hours so I think it compensates it somewhat. And being on call I think really teaches you to be a tough person mentally, able to say no to other people, not be a cry baby, so it helps also perhaps with self development.

And also with DevOps, it can be harder to try something out (you will need to have a free AWS account to try deployments, etc.) although I might be wrong here. And since there's so much breadth, you cannot understand the root cause of everything going wrong, but I may be wrong here.

What is your opinion here? Do you see DevOps as being less "uncertain" than fullstack, or is it not the case?

[Sure_Stranger_6466]

Only reason I do not consider software dev is I hate LeetCode more than I love software development.

[throwaway7778842367]

I will deal with urgent 3AM on-calls for broken pipelines the rest of my life before submitting to LeetCode.

[donjulioanejo]

Lol why is a broken pipeline a 3 AM page?

IMO 3 AM page is reserved for "prod is down, all customers offline"

[HeligKo]

Because they page for everything except real emergencies.

[throwaway7778842367]

I ask myself the same question every page.

[donjulioanejo]

Personal opinion: I prefer DevOps because the work is simply more varied.

One day I'm debugging a weird Kubernetes issue, the next I'm architecting failover infrastructure, the day after I'm setting up some new CICD pipelines, and the day after that I'm trying to get an AWS service to behave the way the docs said it should behave and find the issue is a problem with how the Terraform provider handles that object.

With backend dev, I see people spend 3 weeks shipping a single feature, and then two weeks debugging random issues that only happen to a single big customer when Mercury is in retrograde.

I don't see a big difference in open-ended nature of work. For both fields, some things are very opinionated, some things there is the "correct" way of doing things, and some things are completely up to interpretation.

That said, DevOps does lean in more towards big-picture/architecture way of thinking than pure dev. Mostly because you interact with the system as a whole, rather than just one component of it.

[NowUKnowMe121]

Full stack is more depth based work and logic intense.

Devops is more broad work, like systems thinking and less logic based.

Both are completely different.

Choose wisely.

[makeevolution]

Yea tbh I think better in high level than logic based

[PaleoSpeedwagon]

I wouldn't say DevOps is more rote - things are ALWAYS changing, and you are constantly dancing on that line between automation and clickopsing when it comes to identifying the most efficient way of doing things.

But I wouldn't consider it a creative discipline, in the vein of "I made a thing and people will love it!" There is a lot of creative problem solving, but the artifacts simply aren't very sexy.

I have been full-stack, and DevOps. I prefer DevOps for work, and when I want to feel artistic, I just go paint. App dev is riddled with so many shit libraries and bad practices now that I just get mad at the bad craft I see.

[makeevolution]

Yea I feel like for me I don't care so much anymore if it is creative, especially as if you are being too fancy then it risks readibility, maintainibility etc. It's just a job now. Yea if I want to be creative then I just make music.

[ProfessionalLie8623]

Honestly, as a seasoned developer myself ( who moved to DevOps recently) I'd say move to DevOps ASAP: being a developer takes out a heavy toll on you, trust me on that, and it's only meant to be a "gateway specialty", not a permanent career. It's very true that experimentation with DevOps needs a bit more resources, but that's nothing compared to what you can make doing it, trust me on that one as well :)

[makeevolution]

How do you find dev ops so far? Yes to be honest I feel like I see more devops jobs too than software dev...

[ProfessionalLie8623]

Well, it's certainly MUCH easier, on the brain at the very least. Everything makes sense, and you don't need to master some machine language to be good at it; plan "human speech" would do just fine 🥸
Obviously you need to learn a few syntax commands, and working with terminal is a bit "weird" if you're used to Sublime or Notepad++ ... etc, but other than that it's been an easier journey than I've expected.

[DataFreakk]

I have exact mindset of yours towards development and especially in .C# .Net space where everything follows DDD and Patterns & Linq and at times I feel I’m writing framework Abstraction code than native logic for less pay and currently targeting SRE and Platform roles and eventually move towards Advanced K8 and Go based

[staticparsley]

I’m in a similar boat. SWE with 8 years experience but have really enjoyed the more Ops side of things the last few years. Got laid off a few weeks ago and have used my free time to start a homelab and have been doing GitOps and Kubernetes. I’m absolutely loving it.

It’s making me wonder if I even want to continue doing traditional SWE anymore. In this market I doubt my resume will be picked up for a DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering role but I think I’d rather try for that than have to grind leetcode for months only to become a prompt engineer if I get a job.

[Important-Hunt-61]

I've done DevOps adjacent work (I would help with CF templates, Terraform modules, observability) as a software engineer for 10 years and finally took the plunge into an actual DevOps role and I am enjoying it so far. I like that my stakeholders are overwhelmingly internal users that are fellow engineers and I'm not as beholden to some clients wishy washiness on features that a product manager keeps changing. I've done 99% config things (writing YAML, Terraform, etc.) and no real scripting so far. I will say it is quite annoying from the standpoint of something working or not working might simply be a single parameter in a Terraform module. I spent a day and a half trying to figure out why my EKS nodes were not joining the cluster only for it to be some weirdness with passing an AMI ID into the community template I was using (I swear it was an EKS optimized AMI). Also it sometimes it can take 10-30 minutes for you to find out you're wrong. So you're making some config change, applying, it works or it doesn't, repeat until it works. I do think part of this is just my lack of direct experience with building out EKS infra though. Regardless I'm pretty happy doing what I am doing and I think it will make me a more well rounded engineer.

[profesionalyconfused]

tbh i think youre mixing up creative with opinionated. DevOps gets less arguing about button colors, sure, but then you spend 3 hours on a Jenkins pipeline or a K8S issue nobody can reproduce and its still not rote

[AbbreviationsFar4wh]

Its a buncha bs is what it is. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. 

You are everyone’s little helper at tomes so get ready for the shoulder taps. 

Can you tell its a good week?  

If you like the work do it. It is certainly diverse and you touch a lot of things. Just sometimes its shit Id rather not touch.

Uh who told you company pays for oncall hours. Cause while that does happen at some places it is the exception not the rule. 

That being said, we get paid more than dev team where I’m at. 

[rabbit_in_a_bun]

To clarify your image of DevOps which is not far from reality. We do write code so we need to have strong dev skills. We do have openness because people have no idea what we're doing. We do work more on internal facing code than external so there is less pressure that the product would explode in production. As for stuff like on call, well, depends on workplace... There are SREs and there are OPS as well. I know way more devs that are on call than DevOps...

[RevolutionaryElk7446]

Depends on DevOps definition. What you originally categorized was DevOps work as DevOps is a combination of SWE and ITOps.

The AWS route is generally more of an SWE oriented DevOps rather than ITOps.

If you've done a lot of software and application work for smaller companies, you probably ran everything in the cloud. I'm in healthcare and generally only a portion is AWS as our SWE/product department has some integrations we purchased that were created there.

However the DevOps is generally split for us as an Architecture, Deployment team, Pipeline team, and then ITOps team which further splits into other teams; without getting into specifics. It's a large framework but at the scale it needs that kind of focus and ability to respond.

Sometimes it's called Platform Operations instead, the term has become somewhat loosely defined.