
Ask HN: Transition from Operations to Development? - jiscariot
The last few years I have been getting the bug to transition from operations in to development. The main drivers being that I miss writing code, looking for a new challenge, reduce stress(??)&#x2F;off-hours work, adding flexibility to my job prospects in case I would like to move. I’ve been in the industry for about 17 years, with most of that experience in the enterprise content management specialization. While primarily architecting and building&#x2F;supporting ECM infrastructure, I’ve written code whenever I have the opportunity—things such as lower level system monitors and performance modules.
Given that it is specialized&#x2F;niche field, the compensation is pretty good, but I’m at the point in my career, where it might be time to try something new, otherwise I’ll be doing this for the next 20 years. I have a pretty good knowledge of backend, and plenty of side projects I’ve coded, but don’t have experience as a developer in an enterprise environment, so it would be essentially starting over.<p>I’m curious if there are others on HN who have made the transition from Ops -&gt; Development.<p>How did the transition go? What did&#x2F;didn’t work well?<p>Any thoughts are much appreciated.
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laurentl
Have you considered marketing yourself as a devops engineer? From the sound of
it you already have most if not all of the required skills, and IMO this makes
the transition easier as well as plays on your existing strengths (i.e. you’re
not a would-be developer who has to prove he can code, you’re a seasoned ops
engineer who can help the dev team get their ops shit together). Speaking as a
CTO, I would love to add to my dev team someone who knows what it’s like to be
woken at 2am on Sunday morning because of a stupid bug and who’ll go into the
code base to eliminate anything that triggers a sudden wake up call.

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jiscariot
I really appreciate this advice--I will look in to doing this and ensuring I
have the right toolkit. It does seem like a good intermediate step that could
be taken without completely starting over on a jump to essentially a new
developer role. Thanks again!

