Ask HN: Career Value of DevOps vs. Software Engineer Title

[el_benhameen]

I’m a senior software engineer and have been offered a senior devops role. I may be able to choose whether the title is “devops” or “software” engineer as the role isn’t super well-defined and involves both types of engineering.

I’m wondering if one of these is preferable in terms of career/salary progression and the ability to find other roles easily. I know that “devops” can mean a lot of different things and that I should focus on what I’m good at and enjoy—-those are good points, but right now I’m just curious about others’ opinions on the relative value of the titles.

[mettamage]

When I was researching the SRE and Production Engineer role (Google/FB) I found techies fall into 2 camps (on teamblind.com).

1. Do SWE. SRE is a step down. They didn’t give justification.

2. SRE is useful for any programmer because: you need hardcore OS and networking skills on Linux. You need programming skills. You need sys admin skills. You need system design skills (e.g. live migration of 10K DB servers, while usual automated maintenance should not be interrupted). In some cases, you need hacking skills (for defense). So according to this group, the role is wide and concerns more layers of the stack.

Though not sure if a company calls it devops looks at it in the same way. Google doesn’t call it devops. They claim that SRE implements devops and see devops as an abstract interface.

[beforeolives]

Software engineer - it's been around longer, it's more general and leaves more flexibility for later in your career.

[yuppie_scum]

DevOps. Even though it’s not supposed to be a title, it will instantly put you on the radar of a billion recruiters. It’s an insanely valuable skill to have.

[beforeolives → yuppie_scum]

How is the additional recruiter visibility useful given that

- they just got offered a job and won't be on the market in the near future

- they can clearly get a senior devops job anyway

?

[fabiomaia → yuppie_scum]

Why?

[ADuckOnQuack → fabiomaia]

“DevOps” is currently a hot buzzword in the industry, many non-technical people in management hear about DevOps and how it’s good but do not understand what it is. They proceed to conflate DevOps culture as a position or individual skill and seek out to hire anyone with the term on their resume.

[emptysongglass → ADuckOnQuack]

Well that and the hodgepodge of skills that make up DevOps are not taught in university yet are desired from candidates who have established years of being a DevOps Engineer but given the field's infancy are in short supply.

[tossaway9000]

I moved out of a SWE role into SRE role a few years ago, then into SRE management role.

This is my experience, YMMV:

Pros:

1. Get to do a variety of things, not stuck writing business rules in one particular language.

2. Paid better than most if not all of the web developers in our division.

3. Feels like a stable role at the moment. Hiring replacements has been difficult so company has made some effort to keep our team happy. We've survived an initial COVID staff reduction.

Cons:

1. On-call rotation and having to support code you didn't write (especially if it turns out to be of poor quality) can be frustrating.

2. I'm finding it hard to pivot into a development role again, after not having done full-time development in a few years. Both finding the time to catch-up and not getting great responses for applications I send out to other companies.

3. Working with one particular cloud provider isn't challenging. I don't feel like I'm learning any actual skills, just "the way AWS would like you to do things".

4. A lot of the CI/CD, Configuration management, and Infrastructure as Code tools feel like they're still in the dark ages (hey let's just add templating to YAML, it'll be great /s)

[3minus1]

I switched from SWE to devops and leveraged it into a job at FAANG. I think switching was good for my career because I was doing kind of boring CRUD and the devops work was way more interesting. Devops also has as hype factor as some others have mentioned. On balance, there are way more SWEs at my company than devops. So just looking in terms of supply and demand, the base demand for hiring SWEs will always be higher given there are so many more SWE positions in existence. I would take the devops title because it gives you more flexibility to pursue devops or SWE positions in the future. I don't really think one is better than the other in terms of salary.

[sloaken]

I worked one jib where the titles were odd. I was a 'Senior member of Technical Staff' Reality was I was a SW team leader / project manager. The job labels on your resume are to frame out what you say you did at the job. If your title and your work do not match, then it will cause issues in matching you to the right job.

One place I worked at regularly gave out new titles, same job just a 'new and improved' title.

Of course, if you just want to impress your mother, go Engineer. Co-workers DevOps. The hot girl at a party ...

[mettamage → sloaken]

> The hot girl at a party ...

I always say drugs dealer, homeless person, language teacher to camels or internet millionaire. Or whatever I feel like really. Or at least, 10 years ago (long-term relationship).

Rationale of the first 2: replace the frame with something ridiculous/lower status. Keep disqualifying yourself to the absurd. Example: selling rainbow pills to little blue smurfs as a drugs dealer? What’s in the rainbow pill she asks? Now you steered the conversation clear of a serious answer and you are now in control of it with a playful frame!

Rationale of number 3: immediately go to fantasy land. If she doesn’t immediately want to go with you, then she likely does not have a high openness to experience (or having a bad day). For me, at times, that was a strict selection criterion.

Rationale of number four: see if she believes you, how she responds to status and how she responds to you trolling her a bit :P

Common theme here is setting the frame to play. I would say anything, as long as I felt I was playing and non-verbally communicating that. Some were quick witted back. Others roasted me so hard that we were exploring how roasted I could be, lol. It’s all fun.

That’s what I would do, and did, and had too much fun with (too much fun == the girl is into you but you’re having such a good time joking around that you can’t stop and it all becomes platonic because you couldn’t care less about seducing her — and vice versa — and you don’t care because you and her are laughing the whole time).

Also works the other way around. Playfulness is a fundamental element of meeting someone romantically regardless of gender, IMO. I’d also say it’s fundamental to friendships. It doesn’t have to be this ridiculous though :P

[aristofun]

Current situation and hype aside — obviously software engineering is more wide and flexible term than just devops.

As it is now.

Modern devops knowledge is mostly declarative (hence doesn’t inherently have as much value and is subject to stronger and stronger automation).

While software engineers are the ones who usually automate things.

And who’s knowledge is mostly procedural => more valuable.

Of course all this is “other things equal” because these days one can find devops and programming jobs of any level of complexity/value/salary.

[runawaybottle]

Take the title, it’s bullshit, but take it.

If you don’t completely suck, you can always go back to a regular developer role.

Look, 70% of us are just modern day webmasters, if you can believe that was everyone’s title once upon a time.

Good luck, as none of this will mean anything in 10 years given how ridiculous this industry is. ‘Full stack’ will encompass dev-ops inevitably anyway.

[nickd2001]

Seems to me a decent s/w engineer or s/w developer should know a fair bit about devops, and a decent devops engineer should know about programming. so should be possible to flick between the roles. job title can mean different things in different places so shouldn't be taken too seriously

[speedgoose]

You could always use the other title when you look for a new job.