This article (plus the comments) kind of scares me because I am a CS student who just received an opportunity to work as an SRE Intern at a pretty big company over the next summer break. I took it because I wanted to find out whether SRE is a role for me but I am a bit worried that if I accept a more permanent SRE role after the internship, will it hurt my chances of moving to dev role later in my career.
One thing I noticed about whole SRE/devops scene lately is that there seems to be no grasp of the KISS principle, there are people building elaborate glass houses on top of k8s (tho k8s+pipelines is very useful its easy to get carried away)
another observation is that the people who are not good programmers but are good at appearing to get stuff done (but who create tons of tech debt) seem to fall naturally into SRE roles, as there is no testing culture in pipeline driven development
SRE currently is like the wild west, it be many years before it starts to resemble engineering
Living in the world of Terraform, Kubernetes, and helm has been a godsend because it codifies deployments into a few buckets that removes a lot of this custom code. To be honest I’m thinking the days of DevOps may be numbered.
As with anything, you're going to put out what you put in. If you want to be a low-level C programmer, then spend time doing whatever is related to that.
As long as there is people working (not monitoring) there is job to do. Always read up on the company agreements with contractors and look for the money flow. This will fast get you into the most lucrative Dev role within every company.
I think if it's a startup, it'll be easy to get into either types of roles. From my experience start ups give you massive jumps in career progression in little time even if the company barely cares about career progression. For me this has been due to the tiny size of the teams vs giant teams (my current team is 50 man, in start ups my teams have been no more than 5 people).
Having said all of that, in bigger companies there's more opportunity to pick and choose where you specifically want to focus.
Mileage will likely vary.