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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

That sucks. Can you focus on strengths instead? I happen to find infra quite easy, but CSS/design systems, I just always seem to suck at, and I'm thankful to work with people who are good at these things.

I'm all for working on weaknesses! But at some point I think it's better to focus on where we can add value and play to our strengths.

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I'm exactly the opposite - always been mostly FE. I can find my way around a backend, but you wouldn't want to trust me with a complex/critical system.

I was hired at this company as an FE dev, but after doing a bit of BE work for them, they asked if I wanted to join the platform team. After years of being shielded from devops/infra stuff, I felt like I was stagnating if I stayed in the FE lane, so I went ahead and took the dive.

My mood shifts from one day to the next. Some days I'm okay, but others are really, really hard. Like I'm barely able to understand k8s, and we're also using terraform, helm, etc etc. It might be the largest single learning curve I've ever faced.

Don’t be too hard on yourself, the learning curve as a new infra/platform engineer is VERTICAL. Try not to hide that you’d benefit from some bootstrap assistance in a misguided effort to “not look clueless”, that’s a fast ride to a bad perf review or worse. One strategy that is incredibly effective in this situation is to ask if you can shadow an experienced/skilled team member for a sprint or two, and then switch to pairing with the same type of person for the following month or two. Your rate of learning will skyrocket using this approach, compared to trying to “go it alone” Good luck and enjoy the ride!

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