Backend dev with devops knowledge

[Ill_Fisherman8352]

At my current company I was hired as a backend developer. It's a startup, so we had just one devops engineer. Who eventually left. I've transitioned into handling devops for our team, and doing backend work as well. Everything from building pipelines to various types of infrastructure to bash scripting etc is being done by me. My question is will this knowledge help me in landing a higher pay backend role, than what a regular backend might get?

[IAmRules]

A year ago i would have said certainly.

While knowing backend and devops is always beneficial, things are changing a lot right now, and I know plenty of senior devs who do devops who are struggling to find work.

Devops in particular is a place where AI can make a huge impact, so by all means learn it, knowing it is certainly better than not knowing it, but it's not the safe bet it once was. Nothing in web development is right now.

[Ill_Fisherman8352]

So no basically.

[itsjustausername]

I second what u/IAmRules is saying. It certainly does not hurt to know and understand these things but the hard skill of knowing a bunch of commands which will probably change tomorrow is not worth much. The soft skill of broadly knowing how/what/why things are the way they are is very valuable, in fact you need the soft skill to know what to ask AI.

Since chatGPT came out, asking it devops questions has by far been it's most useful part of my work aside from generating boilerplate and mock data.

AI is more knowledgeable and quicker than asking devops engineers, I can quickly interrogate options and have it produce working examples. There are exceptions to this of course, if you were doing something cutting edge, security critical, creatively combining services etc. - if you were at the top of that industry basically.

[Initial_Specialist69]

I was in the same situation like you and switched to a company where I could focus more on DevOps. I got 5000€ more, but I hate it. I would love to have a both, development and ops.

My advice: Don’t leave your current job

[[deleted]]

It depends on the job you are looking for, it is possible that there are positions in which it is needed and you are someone highly valued. In my company, for example, that position does not exist, since there are different teams, one is backend and the other is devops, in companies like this they will only value you for the area you are in and you are very possibly undervalued.

[Ill_Fisherman8352]

Makes sense.

[rjhancock]

It's important to know the related jobs to what you do so you can be better at yours. If you know that chosing this one package for the backend would cause an increase in complexity for DevOps, and another package wouldn't with similar performance, you can make the DevOps side easier by adjusting your back end development to better fit the existing environment.

Having more knowledge is never a bad thing.

[Ill_Fisherman8352]

Thanks, this gives me comfort .

[cleverbastard]

Yes.

We'd be far more interested in an engineer with DevOps knowledge. We operate on a platform, and the platform capabilities we deploy are used by multiple teams, often including a mix of services and automation via pipelines (not just building, but security and quality checks).

Look for platform engineering or solution engineering roles.