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Comment by ThalesX | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised recently, just how many job offers and what compensation my devops friend is getting (he's been a devops for almost a year... before that he was tech support, very basic technical knowledge becomes he comes from outside tech).

My senior full stack developer LinkedIN requests are pretty low volume for some months now, while he gets flooded with offers with compensation more than most senior devs I know.

His skill set is also (and I love the guy dearly, I'm trying to be objective and he also feels this way) maybe 1 / 5 of what a senior dev has. Basically he's "I’d wager most of what they are doing is using Terraform and YAML to do menial tasks for the engineering team."

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The issue lies exactly with the menial tasks. Ever used Ansible? It's hell. Not because it's hard, but because there's basicially no debugging and so much hidden state. You're lucky if you can use Terraform, but that's not the default. Depending on the stack, DevOps is mainly just trial and error, "getting shit to work", which depending on the Software used can take a while. And then being responsible for the part of infra you got working, which may necessitate unpaid overtime in case of an outage.

EDIT: One thing I forgot is, that in order to be really good at DevOps, you need to know your stack _really_ well, which imo necessitates that you spent at least some time on the development side of things. This goes against every hiring managers instinct though, as people should only specialize in one thing and do it well (at least where I live).

> You're lucky if you can use Terraform, but that's not the default.

Oh god I thought that was unlucky. I have huge respect for Terraform for popularising what they call “infra as code” (we used to just do this with the actual AWS API) but now there’s multiple modern IaCs that use actual code with real tooling.

What's your favourite?

I still like the flexibility of the raw AWS API, but now days CDK and Bicep for anything more complex. I really wanted to like Pulumi but it had a lot of odd bugs and leaky abstractions a couple of years ago when I got into it, it’s probably improved since then.

IaC was popular before Terraform, it's just the first tool that really made it easy to use. Unfortunately you can't make use of it outside of $BigCloud, because it needs common and well established API's to run. If your employer self-hosts, you're either stuck with Ansible or you host OpenStack yourself (which is just a surrogate $BigCloud, since you'll likely employ the services of RedHat to manage it).

Agreed completely on both points - that’s why I wrote “popularising” and yep hosting your own OpenStack is indeed a resource suck.

FWIW, if self-hosts also means Azure Stack Hub then you can also use Terraform. That's what I use.

I don't use OpenStack but there is a Terraform provider to configure it: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/terraform-provider-o...

As someone who transitioned from a DevOps role to a Security Engineer role, the thought of going back gives me anxiety. Having my "log light" turn red at 2am? No thanks. It's not like it woke me up or anything, I'm always awake at 2am, I just don't want to deal with servers at 2am. I'd rather get a good night of sleep and go in the next day and destroy all of the hard work that the DevOps team spent so much time working on. That's a much better fit for me. I wouldn't take a DevOps job even if it paid $50k more than what I'm making now. I just wouldn't enjoy the work. That isn't to say that I'm unwilling to help the DevOps team (I help them all the time by hacking their shit), but I wouldn't actually want to be them again.

If this is true, why are you not moving into "DevOps" roles as well?

Because who wants to be a yaml engineer

It is true. People hire astoundingly incompetent devops all the time. I’ve seen it throughout my career. An issue is most hiring managers and CTO’s also don’t have a devops background, so it’s trivially easy for people to get into situations where they can BS some buzzwords and googled regurgitated definitions like CI/CD and it’s like “welp you know what you’re talking about.”

It’s highly compensated because it’s very needed. A low low % of operations engineers are as good as they need to be. It’s not even always the organization’s or the engineers’ fault, either, as the author of this blog alludes to.

Because no amount of money can compensate for the soul-sucking pain of being a YAML engineer.

Do you base all your decisions about life on a pure money maximizing algorithm?

Picking a horrible position just because of a better salary is a great way to live an unhappy life.

I have a shit job (Python DevOps in tel. co. industry). No problem with that. Previous job was in applied research. Very interesting, unfortunately the work conditions and compensation were much worse than my present-day shitshow.

Life is not only about work, I have to work to be able to pay my mortgage and to enjoy other activities.

Having happy or unhappy life, for people in the IT industry, is mostly about their mindset.

If that lifestyle suits you, sure, go for it. However, by staying in a shit job you are throwing half of your waking hours away. I know this is not an option for everyone, but if one can make enough money from the thing that one enjoy that's like getting half of your life back.

Because the work conditions outside FAANG are garbage, no one that has any regard for their own well-being would get into it. So far everyone I have met that works in infra was in horrible shape, often from stress-related eating disorders and lack of physical exercise.

My friend works outside of FAANG, in Europe, and the DevOps department is super chill.

This question is strange honestly... Because I have a career in software development and I really enjoy doing it? If I wouldn't be in this situation, maybe I would consider doing the switch based on what I've seen.

There's lots of moving parts, some systems are very complex and it's a space where experience is worth a lot - it's hard to get started with ops 101 just by yourself like you can do with frontend web development for example.

As a former DevOps who has moved into SWE, I completely agree. One consolation I might put forward is that there's a larger breadth of knowledge with much less depth when the two are compared.

True only to some extent, the knowledge you need to be a competent devops is huge and i think most techies prefer dev route though i don't know the stats.

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