San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble • Hacker News Board

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#111

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 2:30 PM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #100

ChuckMcM wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the role of the 'IT person' as the system administrator and keeper of updates on things like the Novell server, has given way to Google Apps and Microsoft's Office 365. Small businesses who could barely afford to pay someone before can now eliminate that role and still have email, shared files, back end inventory management and accounts management, and the occasional web developer contract to keep the web si…

I think there's a misconception about performance some perception issues about the ability to do the job. In 6 months of training you might get someone who can sort of do the job, but probably not very well and not at the level of a "real" professional. A good example of this is code camps. They churn out a ton of programmers but very few people that are actual engineers or can carry out actual projects. But to manag…

> They churn out a ton of programmers but very few people that are actual engineers or can carry out actual projects.

Coding is a cheap easy skill that 15-20 years old can do.

Executing and managing a project from start to finish is a rare skill that cannot be acquired in school or the internet.

Coding Monkey => Cheap and easy to find.

Coder who has successfully led and executed projects => Expensive and rare.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#112

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #36

toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. As a sysadmin/network admin/IT manager, it's a buyers market. As a DevOps/infrastructure engineer, it's a seller's market. I think training is part of the problem. More importantly, workers need consulting help around how to take existing skills and use them to apply to upmarket jobs with higher pay.

DevOps/infrastructure engineer is basically a programming position, which sysadmin/IT types may not have strong skills in.

> workers need consulting help around how to take existing skills and use them to apply to upmarket jobs with higher pay.

> DevOps/infrastructure engineer is basically a programming position

sysadmin/network admin ==>> DevOps

IT manager => Manager or lead.

DevOps is not a programming position at all. It is usually cheap system administration (that replace the term sysadmin) and it does NOT require coding. Pay attention to the name and the place you joins, you're can easily be burnt by joining a team of operations monkeys while thinking they were the dev and system type persons.

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#113

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Mar 26, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #78

toomuchtodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google and Amazon have plenty of SRE / System engineers and roles with "developer" in it. All of them write code. And, thankfully, no architects.

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

Re: San Jose and Oakland area job markets tumble

#114

Post by Rapzid » Tue, Mar 28, 2017, 5:13 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #81

ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Amazon have plenty of SRE / System engineers and roles with "developer" in it. All of them write code. And, thankfully, no architects.

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

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.