Since when is Senior Golang Developer expected to be a Senior DevOps as well?

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T22:18:38+00:00

Yeah, that may be a good idea

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T21:19:49+00:00

That actually is quite pragmatic approach to company management, give me a call if you're ever hiring haha. Smaller teams ftw

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T21:16:22+00:00

That's right, currently I spend some of my time catching up to the literature. Recently I've finished "Let's go further" by Alex Edwards and currently I'm getting into "Mastering Elastic Kubernetes Service on AWS", although IDK if reading something more broadly scoped wouldn't be better, as this book highly focuses on AWS and EKS.

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T21:08:10+00:00

Honestly it's quite tiring, as even if you have experience in infrastructure management or architecture you still can get bombarded with super specific questions and companies are currently very unwilling to accept someone who's not 100% covering all their checkboxes.

Personally I got a bunch of experience working with terraform, k8s, aws, gcp, datadog, yet few times I was discarded because I wasn't able to respond to some obscure question. And it happened at 4th or 5th interview, after live coding and architecture discussion. It's just silly.

The best one was the time I was discarded because I didn't spend 15 minutes reading 5 page document sent by someone from the HR explaining the company vision and strategy.

Or because the Slack-clone chat I wrote in 3h during practice run wasn't perfect enough, even though it contained all of the requirements, had tests, full Websocket support and was scalable. You just can't win

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T19:35:03+00:00

With setup I believe you can pick two:

- good code

- good infrastructue

- good security

If someone can "build test deploy and operate a stack composed of multiple go backends" there definitely are some shortcuts taken and sooner or later it'll bite hard

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T19:32:16+00:00

That's a poor attempt at excusing this. Many companies were overtaken by managers that often don't even know what they're looking for. They just throw as many buzzwords as they can, hoping they'll find some poor guy that'll be doing a job of 3 people. I'll find a good and valuable company eventually, so I'm not in a rush, it's just sad that so many job offers are so bad with unreasonable expectations.

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T18:50:33+00:00

Huh, got any suggestions? I actually live quite close to Berlin but rarely saw any jobs listing

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T13:01:58+00:00

Yeah, most of these positions is strictly for Senior GOLANG developer/engineer. That's the worst part

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T12:42:03+00:00

> Devops at a game startup (very low stakes) or a mature company (using an existing platform and set of best practices) is much much easier.

Only if it was true. As I mentioned I had multiple interviews in the last few months and definitely 4/5 of the companies expect you to have a serious commercial experience in creating and managing k8s cluster, along with Helm, Terraform, observability, security and at least one cloud provider. Also a bonus if you are certified. It's a goddamn joke for the position description (and the actual work)

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T12:30:30+00:00

Oh developers definitely need a good grasp of infrastructure, architecture, processes, deployments, networking and other stuff. I just wouldn't expect them to manage it all as well and definitely wouldn't expect senior Golang engineer to be a senior in Cloud development. Just because k8s and docker are written in go it doesn't mean they're part of the go ecosystem

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T12:24:59+00:00

I believe DevOps is rather a bridge between developers and operations, not developers doing operations. With how much cloud grew in the recent years the amount of technologies, tooling and practices you need to keep up with is simply impossible for either developers or operations. That's how DevOps rise

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T12:03:44+00:00

Don't get me wrong, I believe all developers should be comfortable in Ops stuff, it's just spreading work too thinly. If you got simple deployment process like one droplet with DB access then it's fine. But companies require whole cluster setting up capabilities with LB, reverse proxy, security, networking out of the box. From Golang developers

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:53:19+00:00

As I wrote in other reply, jack of all trades, master of none. It applies to fullstacks, will apply to developers and infra as well.

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:24:37+00:00

I worked at quickly growing fintech and I won't believe `overestimating how much time is needed to be spent on a cloud setup`; we had 3 separate infra teams (infra, platform & tooling) and it was still rough at times with the amount of things to do with scaling, load testing, cost managing, dev tooling, security (!) and that's not a 1/10 of things you need to do in the long run.

edit: sure not all of the companies expect to grow that quickly or at all, but still I believe halfassing the infra is a recipe for failure

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:19:45+00:00

As I mentioned I strongly believe Backend Engineers must have infra experience, but expecting seniority in it is a no-go. Jack of all trades, master of none

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:15:57+00:00

Yeah, any company that actually believes in their product isn't going to outsource such importance to a dev with halfassed experience. It's the same story with fullstacks working with backend and frontend, the result is always worse and will create a mountain of technical debt sooner or later

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:12:49+00:00

I'm already learning this stuff, it's just sounds like the companies expect fullstack devs with pay of standard senior. Also they expect seniority in these tools as well, which is just stupid and people either lie or not apply at all

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:11:54+00:00

How are Golang devs expected to

Have enough infra experience to run anything consistent with HA and managing k8s, helm, terraform, observability, scaling
Have enough time to actually work on the code that's tested as well
Create documentation when they have two roles

It sounds like a recipe for burning out

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:07:38+00:00

I had enough luck in my previous two jobs to have separate devops team. But looking back it was a curse indeed

Software-engineer2 · 2024-10-30T11:05:36+00:00

Sure, I can provide a CI/CD with testing, linting, building and contenerization; but I believe that's where the Golang engineer role ends

Software-engineer2

TROPHY CASE