I've been a DevOps/SRE essentially my entire career and almost always in Finance (banks, FinTech startups, multiple hedge funds etc) and most recently in crypto.
It's seemed that for SWEs the path was always something like:
- junior
- team lead
- manager
- manager of managers
- CTO (or VP of Engineering etc)
For SREs/DevOps it always felt a bit fuzzier after manager and most of the manager of managers I know ended up being that role in an "infra" department (e.g. k8s, networking etc).
I would love to know what folks with my background ended up doing later in their careers/age mid 40s and above?
(all of this is even more fuzzy due to LLMs/AI and part of me feels like it's time to start pivoting into some kind of IRL service or manufacturing role given the speed at which things are developing. e.g. maybe I should buy a bakery...)
Open to all kinds of stories and suggestions here as would most likely benefit me and also lots of other folks reading the comments.