[toomuchtodo]

I wouldn't call Ansible and Terraform programming languages. In two and a half years at a well known startup, I've written less than 1000 lines of code in a senior DevOps/Infra role.

DevOps/infrastructure is knowing how to glue together off the shelf tools and understanding how everything works. Great that as a dev you can probably bolt these tools together with docs, but your lack of context with the underlying fundamentals will eventually bite you.

[jacquesm]

> DevOps/infrastructure is knowing how to glue together off the shelf tools and understanding how everything works.

That's actually not that much removed from quite a few programming jobs. It's mostly different manuals and the occasional plug to fit into a socket but other than that the differences are smaller than the similarities and debugging skills are important for both of them.

[toomuchtodo]

Agreed.

[Rapzid]

Some of the more junior/limited roles amount to that. Higher-end roles involve a much, much broader skillet including development.

[toomuchtodo]

Higher end roles are architecture. If it's development, you're a developer.

[ex_amazon_sde]

Google and Amazon have plenty of SRE / System engineers and roles with "developer" in it. All of them write code.

And, thankfully, no architects.

[user5994461]

They definitely have people who architect their systems. Just because there isn't a formal title doesn't mean they are not there.

[toomuchtodo]

The rest of the world is not Google and Amazon (thankfully).

[Rapzid]

This is dead but I thought I might comment anyway..

Your comments convey a very narrow perspective of the job market that falls under "DevOps". That is to say, the sphere of roles looking to be filled by companies who believe they are filling a "DevOps" role is much larger than what you believe. It almost seems as if you are limiting yourself and projecting that onto the entire job market.

Now, I'm not sure you consider your current position as "limiting".. However, I can say that there are MANY roles being filled for "DevOps" candidates that extend beyond writing Ansible roles or Chef cookbooks. Speaking as someone 6 years into their engineering career and as the person who wrote the initial powershell(as a linux cloud engineer!) feature provider for Chef, I would not have taken a role such as you describe after year 1.

Now, you may be in a position where writing Ansible or Chef resources long term sounds swell. That's fare! But there are many, MANY roles that fall into the systems engineer/SRE bucket that are labeled at DevOps! Honestly, they are a matter of degree! The higher-end roles are senior, lead, unique, and require heavy development skills. If it's not the provisioning platform you are developing and supporting, it's the performance characteristics of the product itself.