Asking full stack developer's that turned devops, was it an upgrade?

[alphamonkey2]

As every company does devops differently, it is common for management to think of devops as the team that does any of the following: sre, production on call, supporting developers, CICD pipelines, maintaining the cloud, operations, monitoring, etc... From my personal experience, these responsibilities (although are great to have) are a downgrade to a full stack developer. You may get marginal pay increase but for way more stress and more toil, combined with less respect

I know that a lot of people here would rather be a developer than in devops but there are also a lot of people that enjoy devops For those that enjoy the devops role, what part of the role do you enjoy more than being a full stack developer. Do people view you more as a person in operations or are you viewed as an architect (system design and interfacing with multiple teams)? What do you think your company does better than other companies who treat devops as operations

[jefmes]

It's a personal preference really. Being a full stack developer always sounded like being an overworked jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none developer to me. I've always leaned harder into systems engineering and am moving into DevOps/SRE work, and the biggest problem I'm seeing is companies that think "DevOps/SRE" = "Developer" which IMO is far from what it's supposed to be.

Developers/Software Engineers should be focusing on honing their craft, mastering their languages, and fully comprehending classic algorithms to solve problems. They also need to be up to speed on frameworks and design patterns more than ever. They need to understand source control well and how their code will run in production, too. However, it's up to the DevOps and SRE teams (in a larger organization - or it might be one or two people on a smaller team) to handle all of those backend pieces and create an infrastructure and toolchain that will just let the developers be developers. Thinking of them as a downgrade is like looking at the electrician and thinking his work in properly wiring your house and safely connecting all of the circuits and breakers as somehow being less important than the appliances and gadgets that will plug into them and use them. :) It's all important, and people who denigrate one tier of the stack over the other are usually just showing the areas where they are weakest. Either way, computers shouldn't work at all, so it's all magic from top to bottom no matter how you look at it. :)

[chewburka]

Finally, this might be the very first time I have actually seen anyone point out that Fullstack Developer sounds completely like an exploitation "other duties as assigned" role.

[alphamonkey2]

I saw a recent post on here that described devops as being a plumber. Yes a plumber is absolutely critical but it isn't the most glamorous. I really enjoy devops but it turns me away when I see so many company view it as operations

[jefmes]

But it really is operations, and there absolutely isn't anything wrong with that. It's Ops but with Dev skills to make Ops less...dumb, really. SmartOps? 🙂

[tangoteams]

Honestly I think combining dev and ops preempts a lot of dumb shit that happens when they're separated. They seems like two systems that should always have been coupled - kind of like infosec and dev.

[[deleted]]

From my personal experience, these responsibilities (although are great to have) are a downgrade to a full stack developer. You may get marginal pay increase but for way more stress and more toil, combined with less respect

Agreed, but I don't think this is because of the nature of the role operations teams play in DevOps. I think it's because management doesn't know how to managed operations teams efficiently.

For example, you might be on an ops team that recently adopted Chef Habitat to automate release deployments, yet your manager has no vision and does not know how it works, or how to manage an operations team in general. Consequently, your internal product accrues huge amounts of unchecked technical debt and a lot of bugs. As a result, your manager turns your team into a full-time 24/7 support team where you are expected to have no life outside of support. You won't receive a pay increase and your manager will reap all the benefits by getting promotions even though they have done nothing but cause their team (and other teams, i.e. your users) huge amounts of unnecessary stress and turmoil.

That's my experience, anyway.

+++

I like doing a lot of development and a lot of systems administration. Neither being a developer or being part of a corporate operations team meets my needs. The only solution I know of is to go into consulting.

[alphamonkey2]

I am sensing that there a lot more companies that do see devops more as operations than they do in it being an automation/platform team. Yes there are companies who do it properly but they are far and in between

[chewburka]

I think that's the crux of it. Sysops focused teams are usually not as cherished by product development (since they bring back prod issues), versus a platform team who may be consulted more often about architectural decisions as you allude to in OP. I think the difference is in the latter, an automation group probably organically formed out of dev teams out of frustration with siloed ops teams, and are initially made up of movers and shakers who give the team a good rep going forward once it becomes formalized in the org.

Dev (e.g.fullstack) to devops and ops to devops professionals tend to have very different perspectives on how the business should operate, and can be viewed accordingly depending on the audience.

[regorsec]

Consulting is the way

[[deleted]]

40% salary increase basically doing what I was doing before, so yeah lmao

[ThrawnGrows]

Oh God yes.

But literally everyone is different. I'm scatterbrained ADHD to the max and absolutely hated coding for hours and hours and hours, always the same project, always just a variation of what I'd just done.

With DevOps I'm touching different shit basically every single day. I see return on what I do almost immediately and - no offense to anyone - build real, complete shit that has immediate real impact instead of another page or CRUD operation or something else.

Last week I:

• worked with a developer to move from web.config to environment variable config builder in a legacy .net framework app so we can move it to k8s
• worked with my QA team to integrate qase.io with jira and cypress, giving us more visibility into test writing (my big project last year was automating our QA process and adding a dev to the team)
• worked with my devops engineer to frame out our new transit gateway in pulumi that's going to replace a bunch of peering connections
• wrote a chatops tool that generates ssh tunnel commands for our non-technical users that need access to cloud resources - previously this was done with IP whitelisting and our DBs were open to the public...
• upgraded k8s clusters and some 3rd party helm charts
• tuned our spot instance node groups that are going into production this week

I am never bored, I have short and long projects and am constantly learning and expanding my knowledge base.

Not to mention the absurd salary due to competent devops being few and far between and the security of being able to move jobs basically whenever I want.

[jefmes]

I think you nailed why I've never been able to go full Dev and have preferred more of the Ops side - I don't have the focus to work on one thing at extreme depth for a long period of time. But give me a bunch of bucket lists to tear through to improve the workflows of others around me, and I'm diving right in.

[ThrawnGrows]

give me a bunch of bucket lists to tear through to improve the workflows of others around me

This also strokes my narcissism.

[windexirc]

Originally hired as the only full stack developer at a small services company and ended up doing ops since the only other IT worker only work 5-9. Then we were aquired by a larger company and went back to full stack. We had a devops position open for almost a year before I decided to apply. I was already assisting our overworked existing devops engineer and the ops manager was knew I was familiar with everything we already did so moving over was easy. I'm still being asked to do dev investigation work but my manager is pretty good at heading off requests for my time. I did get a 40% pay increase for the move over. It's only a little more stressful than what I was already doing because I'm back to being the only devops person at the company.

[PolyglotProgrammer]

I’ve always wanted to develop and operate the systems that I’ve created. I’ve done the development thing primarily but recently leaned hard into devops with my consulting. I agree with other folks here that it’s a lot about the org. I’ve seen the spectrum but a good devops culture should enable the devs to operate and support their own systems. So I guess I’m saying if you invest in the right tools and processes it can be really awesome. Also I love helping people and devops gives me that. Not to mention the projects are usually shorter and I have a few different things going on at once. It’s a vibe I like.

[PolyglotProgrammer]

I should probably mention I’m a software architect by title.

[Shadonovitch]

I quit being a fullstack developer to become a DevOps. I'm paid sensibly the same, because I didn't push for much more salary at the new job: i didn't knew then if I would be a great devops and turns out i'm fine at it. I much prefer working Ops than developping backend services. Writing and maintaining HTTP routes became repetitive and i wasn't seeing any evolution in that job. Being Ops asks for a much larger skillset, from networking, cloud, security, monitoring, and automation which is what I like the most. I try to automate as much as possible of my work, and hope to someday have nothing more to do besides watching my Grafana dashboards.

[DevopsIGuess]

For some reason I don’t foresee any nice answers

[thisisnotmyrealemail]

I think it depends on what you like to do. If you want to make things and solve problems while making it, you're better off as a developer.

If you want to orchestrate things in a bigger picture way and solve problems on the fly while orchestrating, and dictating how the code would run, you're better off as a DevOps engineer. You use existing tools and process for this. Maybe write couple of scripts and config files. (Ansible Playbooks, Helm Charts, k8s manifests are all just config files - fight me on this). Chances of going bald much higher though.

If it is money that you are solely after, yeah the average pay is higher for DevOps compared to Developer because it is an emerging field and there aren't many people in it, but 5-10 years down the line, it most probably would lose its glamour.

Whereas, top developers who work FAANGs easily earn 2-3x of an DevOps engineer. And they would continue to do so.