
Ask HN: Is it a good idea to start career as a dev ops engineer? - csstud
I am currently attending my final year in a premier college. I am very much interested in development and have worked on many side projects during my time in college. I got an offer for dev ops position from an MNC. I always thought of myself as a developer. But networking and systems administration also sounds interesting to me. Is it difficult to switch to an SDE position in future if I started working as dev ops engineer? What are the career prospects of a dev ops engineer?
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dozzie
First: don't think of the job as a "devops engineer". It's still a position
for system administrator. You'll be working with operating system and maybe
with hardware.

Second: as a sysadmin you'll be expected to manage servers and services.
Nobody will give a damn how you do that (except for fellow sysadmins), as long
as you don't break anything (too much, too often). This means that nobody will
give a damn what language and runtime you use to automate things.

As a sysadmin that writes tools, which means a _system programmer_ , except
without the "programmer" title, you'll fly under radar in most organizations
and you'll be free to choose any tool that does the job. I learned Erlang this
way (I'm a sysadmin/system programmer myself).

And me today? I get offers for programmers quite often, and if I was to go
down this road, I probably could land somewhere; I don't know OOP design
patterns or latest JavaScript framework by heart (I never learned them
specifically), but I have many tools written and published and used to this
day, so my programming-fu is quite strong.

So yes, I think it may be a good move to take this job. It certainly was good
for me ten years ago.

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joeyrideout
I'm 2/3 of the way through a co-op CS degree, and have dipped my toes in both
camps. Spent ~8 months interning as a Software Engineer (web dev) and am
coming up to ~8 months in a more back-end/dev-ops role.

In the software role I had no idea how apps were actually deployed, and had
never touched anything like AWS. At hackathons, for example, I was always
clueless when it came to deploying my app and could only ever demo locally.
Now, I am very comfortable deploying the code I write in a variety of
production environments. Experience with the bottom end of the stack has made
me a more productive developer since I have more experience with, say,
database migrations, and can debug environment-related issues on my
development machine much quicker on my own.

So in my opinion, dev-ops skills are useful and highly transferable, so you
should do what interests you. In the worst case you lose interest and flip-
flop to another part of the stack and come away as a more well-rounded
engineer.

