HACKER Q&A
📣 pfifferlinge

Career Change from Dev to DevOps?


I'm a software developer/architect with 20 years of experience in software development and system architecture. In most jobs that I had, I was spending roughly 3/4 of time on development and 1/4 of time on DevOps and infrastructure work.

Recently I have implemented a system I consider to be the masterpiece of my career (not bragging - just trying to explain the situation) and somehow I have a feeling that my motivation for working on yet another software development job has faded a bit (probably temporarily).

However, I noticed that my interest in DevOps topics didn't decrease, and in fact has intensified.

Therefore I have question for fellow HN-ers: Those of you that made a career switch from Dev to DevOps, can you share your experience? Pros, cons, advices, warnings... anything you find important to emphasise. Any input is much appreciated.

  👤 verdverm Accepted Answer ✓
As a DevOps, you get to play with all the tech, but you also have to be on call. (One pro and cons, depending on where you devops) It's been fun, I'm really about automation {the larger set of automations}, and it's been foundational and transformative for me.

Kelsey Hightower had a good talk about what DevOps means in a post Kubernetes world. I think it was a DevOps conference in Seattle iirc. It's on YouTube somewhere

https://cuelang.org (DevOps futurology)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof (my work)