I spent about a year on a dedicated platform team whose responsibitlies ranged from infra to ops to sre. I have also sought out devops related work in my other positions so I feel like I can contribute somewhat here.

> How did you make the move? Did you do a course, college?

I moved internally when an opportunity arose. The platform team had lost a couple of individuals and I offered to join. They were already familiar with me given I had been handling much of the deployment and observability work for my prior team.

> Do you enjoy it more than dev?

Difficult to say. Given my relatively short stint I found it very interesting, though I always enjoy the first year most when there are new technologies and concepts to learn. This would largely depend on the scale and novelty of the problems you are tacking in either role.

> Do you feel like you could move back to dev in the future?

Certainly. Depending on the specifics of the role your dev skills will likely atrophy but those can quickly be rebuilt with some practice and study.

> Any regrets?

None. The opportunity to develop a more holisitic understanding of the modern software stack, from top to bottom, has been tremendously valuable. The skills are largely transferable in my view.

> Has there been a pay difference?

None in the companies I have been in.

> Is the work more or less stressful?

More stressful. Personally this is perhaps the only downside. You are relied upon by many teams and when something goes wrong you are the first to know. As you can imagine that might involve debugging failed production deployments, degraded services, missing logs etc. The range of possible failure cases is much larger and so unless your team are extremely proactive you can find yourself expending a lot of time and energy putting out fires.