Ask HN: DevOps Career Advice for an Oldy

In infra roles, there is little "business side" of the work and hence could be more easily commoditized.

I work at a big tech company and the staff engineer in our org has been at the company for 4+ yrs and has A LOT of domain expertise in ads, and institutional knowledge about a lot of different systems in the company.

Domain expertise is directly transferrable to some companies, and having a lot of institutional knowledge is also a good selling point IMHO -- e.g. asking good questions in an interview about a companies stack could show that you can very quickly understand some nuances of the types of systems they built/are building since you've done something sorta similar.

I've also seen us hire pretty senior people with a good amount of domain expertise but didn't know ALL the shiny new tools, but did show they were keeping sharp in SOME of them.

I have had several conversations this year with project manager- or dev team manager-types that lead me to believe that non-software companies are beginning a mass move into cloud services.

I hear AWS and Azure mentioned much more than Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Job search platforms seem to return job posting result counts that match that ( AWS >> Azure >>>> GCP ).

I have also been surprised to have hiring managers refer to Java/C# programmers as a pure commodity in non-software companies. In one case, a project manager for technical dev in a nationally (US) large insurance company said that they mostly just ask one of the large body shops for three resumes and pick one almost at random.

Based on the above and your financial services experience, I would stay in financial services to leverage your industry knowledge. I would try to shift into AWS (or Azure if you think financial services companies would prefer Microsoft to Amazon) and Kubernete/Docker and get deep experience in effectively using those techs. Try to avoid taking a lower paying job unless you have to?

I'm really torn about programming advice. I love coding and just writing software, but I think non-software companies see coders as low-value employees. Of course, that is a total over-generalization. I don't think having some magic number of years in Python is particularly game-changing.

I have discovered that in my region that tech managers are making salaries at least 25% more than programmers and often 50% more. Personally, I am having some second thoughts about spending the last few years as an individual contributor rather than making the jump to management. Also, the highest, most surprising salaries I have heard all belong to technical managers. In some cases, I have confirmed manager base salaries that approach 3X what developers are earning. Mind blown. However, I will also say that the few folks I know in this position were reasonably successful software engineers that moved into systems architecture and with some consulting background. So part of what made the salary happen was understanding how to make a value-proposition pitch to a specific industry need that was acceptable to hiring orgs. Meaning, patio11 is again right - charge more.

I think this contributes to the obsession with tools by my peers rather than obsession with the goal and why I hope to move into a more SRE-like role at some point.