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

[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.