I've been at a large tech company for over two years. My official title is a Senior DevOps Engineer, but my day-to-day work makes me wonder if it's time for me to transition into something else.
I've worked as a DevOps Engineer at other companies and did things like write Python scripts, "containerized" applications, and designed CI/CD processes to deploy them on the cloud. This is the type of work I'm keen on.
Our company has been migrating from old and insecure technology to stuff more modern. We work on a data platform that many different teams rely on, so these migrations have been a drag. Actually, we have been doing some type of migration for over two years now, and there is no end in sight. Management has said things like, 'once we are out of migration, we will focus on improving our automation, cleaning up our code base, and exploring new projects', but I seriously doubt we will be doing anything fun like that in the near future, if ever.
Nowadays, most of my work is responding to support requests from data engineers who have problems running their analytics queries. Practically speaking, it's a lot of troubleshooting spark jobs, trying to reproduce errors, and filing tickets with our vendors because no one on the team has any expertise in the Hadoop ecosystem. Our customers are data engineers and business analysts and most of them don't really understand basic software engineering practices, and I often feel like I'm a help desk for them.
I hardly write any code anymore. I like working within Kubernetes and I like writing Python and bash scripts and automating things, but I rarely get to do that. Instead, it's migration support, trying to satisfy security criteria where the CVEs and patches never end.
We are a small team and we have a weekly on-call rotation that is sometimes quiet, and sometimes stressful. When I originally joined the company I was told there was no on-call responsibilities, but that changed about 6 months in.
It feels like my role has morphed into something I didn't sign up for. I haven't spoken much about it, so I'm posting here to see if anyone can relate and has any guidance or questions I should think about.
Thanks for reading.
