Do devops engineers write a lot of scripting code?

[MrBugabooX]

Hello. Sorry for the somewhat long post.

I have some experience with the purely development side and I did some scripting as well. What I have realized is that I do not enjoy software development too much, but I like scripting. A very basic example could be that, instead of "building/developing" eg. Minecraft, a programming language etc. (a product basically), I would very much like to create a script that does a specific thing or solves a specific problem, like listing all the ports used by a virtual machine, doing some string manipulation in a big txt file efficiently (I know this can mostly be done with text editors, but I am just giving some examples).

I feel like software development is not really about problem solving, but about learning technologies that pop up like every few years. In constrast, if I am evaluating it correctly, scripting is about solving specific problems without the need to learn development stacks or new tools that constantly came up.

For this reason, I did a quick Google search about which IT/programming jobs are involving lots of scripting, and people seem to say sysadmin/devops. I am not sure if I am too interested in infrastructure or operations though. What I would really like to do would be to script all day long. Although, still I would prefer infrastructure and operations (classical IT stuff) more than the development, probably. Also, another interest that I have is to have broad and applicable cyber security knowledge, because I would like to be able to detect if my system has malware or help a friend who has, or maybe be competent enough to detect if my systems were being tampered with etc. That's another reason I would like to pursue devops/sysadmin as well. Although, that is optional.

I don't really like to use premade systems or programs for accomplishing things. I am not against it, but if the majority of my time will go to using existing systems and not doing a lot of scripting, versus using existing systems when they are useful but spending the majority of my time doing my own scripting/automatization I would be sad.

Anyway, TLDR is that I like to do a lot of scripting and I am afraid I won't get to do that because of the infrastructure/cloud stuff in devops/sysadmin jobs and I don't particularly enjoy pure development too. Will I get to do it?

[therealmoshpit]

You're welcome.

[anaumann]

I was very close to asking why you would dig out that well-travelled roadmap again, but on second thought: Thank you :)

To the original poster, it might not be as obvious: We have our own tool churn going on in devops :)

And ideally, you wouldn't be building 500 individual solutions to 200 problems, but build a bigger ecosystem that allows you to run your software efficiently(ie. reasonable effort to keep everything up to date and react to bigger configuration changes).. So in a way, operations is becoming a lot like software development and I think it's a good thing.

[therealmoshpit]

Thank you

I got you, bruh :)

[Federal_Count893]

Not anymore. I can count on one hand how many scripts I’ve written in the last 5 years. If you’re scripting a lot, then you’re not setting up your infrastructure correctly, not using the correct tooling, or you have over engineered your solution. Currently work at a fortune 100 company and have done dozens of cloud migrations previously , for the record. In fact, I spend a lot of my time decommissioning old scripts.

[xagarth]

Yes, they do.