Ask HN: Do I risk getting “pigeonholed” by accepting an Operations Engi. role?

Sorry if this is the wrong usage of "Ask HN", I'm not sure if this is the right usage or not.

Anyway, basically I'm a 4th year CS student who will graduate sometime next year (so basically I'll graduate around year 4.5).

edit: oh and this is a full-time internship, not a full role since I'll have to go back to school for 1 or 2 quarters after summer.

Anyway, I applied to a company; I heard about the company from their senior director of engineering - basically the guy came up to talk to us during a "poster session" at our school's "capstone" competition that my team won (basically 4th years form teams and try to create products).

Anyway, since I have experience on my resume in general scripting, writing simple integration scripts with sed/awk, computer security and the like (aside from traditional dev experience), I ended up getting interviewed for an operations engineer role.

The onsite went well and I should be receiving an offer soon, but basically my concern is, if I accept this role am I likely to get stuck in it? I like stuff like continuous integration, containerization etc but more from the development perspective (so I guess what you'd call devops, as much of a buzzword as that is).

I liked all the engineers I met with, and they made a point that operations works closely with development, but obviously don't write any production code, just the scripting/general automation coding around it.

I'm kind of rambling now but I think experience with AWS, kubernetes, network administration etc would help round out my skills, but I'm wondering if it's a better idea to focus on development and learn those skills as part of development rather than sort of separated from it.

Thanks for any advice

1. Once you have a job at a company it's often possible to move sideways into another team at the company.

2. It's just an internship, you're not choosing your whole career.

1+2 suggest this may be fine opportunity to get regular programmer job at this company. Just make sure you spend time with people in other teams too, and if you like their roles better you can, at end of internship, go talk to them about getting job there after school.

Good work experience is good work experience. It will earn you more opportunities and money down the road. Just insure you mix development and ops if you want the flexibility to be able to do both down the line. If you only do software engineering then you may end up building really poor applications because you do not have the systems engineering experience to know how to scale and secure apps appropriately.

Since it is just an internship it will not be your first and last job. If you want to do one for some time that is fine, as when you apply for another role you will normally have to pass engineering tests for the job at hand which will let you know if it is right for you. The really good jobs ask you questions related to what you or your peers are actually doing.

Thanks dude :)

My eventual goal is to be competent in basically every part of the stack, so I think this role will fit me.

I'm not sure. As a guess, it's probably a bit easier to get a higher salary as ops than dev. This doesn't have much to do with value, since corps usually cannot perceive your value. Rather, it's more that you're closer to where the rubber hits the road. And unlike a dev, often ops will be expected to pull nearly infinite hours if something awful happens.