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I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

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Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#71

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”.

I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took advantage of every opportunity to put myself in front of the customer virtually and physically.

Learned through osmosis how the senior consultants, engagement managers (project managers) and account managers operated.

Got Amazoned almost 4 years later and became a staff consultant at a 3rd party firm (equivalent to a senior at AWS or GCP) and while I lead “delivery” projects, I’m still learning how things work at the next higher level of the funnel - pre sales. The level of ambiguity is high by the time it gets to me. But at least sales has narrowed down what high level business outcomes the customer wants.

My thesis is the closer I get to both the revenue drivers and where people skills matter, the less ageism is a factor and experience is actually rewarded and the harder it is to be outsourced, commoditized or replaced with AI. I’ve been concerned about commoditization for over a decade and that definitely happened on the enterprise dev side

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#72

Post by mptest »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #71

I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”. I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took advantage of every oppor…

is there anyway you'd be willing to field a few questions from a soon to be cs grad interested deeply in this specific career path after realizing they'd been doing it in a way for free already. good experience, but unconventional experience who aspires to a position similar to yours?

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#73

Post by k__ »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #68
k__ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. In most companies, IT people just started coding and called it DevOps. Still better than IT folks who refuse to code.

Smart IT people were automating things with Perl and later Powershell since I started professionally working in Windows shops in 2000. Before that I was working on DEC VAX machines where IT was using DCL.

Yeah, but I studied with a bunch of guys who said they'd go into IT, because they hated coding.

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#74

Post by nickjj »

antonvs wrote: post #29
nickjj wrote: post #14

I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work. It just happens to be a wider spectrum of things vs their usual "write YAML" in that 1 role. Sounds like the original poster found a more enjoyable role with the same title? I do a ton of different things every day and have been for the last ~10 years, all in the neighborhood of DevOps'ish type of tasks. I've written about 120+ of those tasks at https://ni…

> I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work. This is very, very wrong. Why do you think that?

> Why do you think that?

The OP wrote:

> As an SE, I'm exposed to everything. Customers running Kubernetes, ECS, Lambda, bare metal, air-gapped environments. AWS, Azure, GCP, hybrid setups. CI/CD in Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI. I have to understand their environment well enough to actually help them, so the learning is constant. The stagnation I felt in DevOps? Gone.

These are all things I deal with in my day to day as well in a DevOps / Infrastructure / Platform type of role. I mean, not literally everything like air-gapped environments since the companies I work for don't have that but it's all things in that category of line of work.

The only difference is I usually don't interface directly with the company's customers of the services being built. It's more like the company's staff are my customers because I'm working with developers, management and sometimes other parts of the business on ways to help optimize their workflows which all funnel back to helping create a better end customer experience.

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#75

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mptest wrote: post #72
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #71

I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”. I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took advantage of every oppor…

is there anyway you'd be willing to field a few questions from a soon to be cs grad interested deeply in this specific career path after realizing they'd been doing it in a way for free already. good experience, but unconventional experience who aspires to a position similar to yours?

Everyone I know who has done it, started out as a developer, moved up to a tech lead position and while doing so learned soft skills and presentations and gut real world experience with designing systems and then moved into consulting.

It’s from my seeing the lay of the land in 2026 almost impossible to get a full time job in a consulting company starting out of a college with just an undergrad doing something technical - unless you are in one of the cheaper countries to hire from.

Most besides the WITCH companies use the business models of hire people in the US for the customer facing roles and hire people in cheaper countries for the Lower level roles.

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#76

Post by CuriouslyC »

I worked for 7 years employed by a high throughput computing facility at a large university as a combination of solution engineer/software architect. I got paid to network with faculty, listen to their problems, pitch them ideas and implement POCs, then help them iterate and scale.

If the management of the department hadn't been so catastrophically bad, it would have been the ideal job. Working more traditional software engineering roles afterwards was frustrating, I missed the freedom. Even as a tech lead, it just felt like managing plumbers. I love creativity and exploration, nuts and bolts are incidental.

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#77

Post by [deleted] »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #71

I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”. I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took advantage of every oppor…

[deleted]

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#78

Post by [deleted] »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #71

I realized a decade ago at 40 if I wanted to still stay relevant, make more money, not go into management and not still be trying to compete with 25 year olds based on how well I could reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I had no choice but to get closer to “the business”. I got a job in cloud consulting specializing in app dev - “application modernization” at AWS (mid level L5) in 2020. Took advantage of every oppor…

[deleted]

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#79

Post by dilyevsky »

NoSalt wrote: post #15

I am a software developer. I went to college to learn software development. Two years ago, they tried to tack DevOps on to my job description. I told them "no thanks", then had to find another job. I found one and am MUCH happier not having to do that DevOps crap. No offense, but it a soul-draining undertaking, and I like writing code ... ONLY!

> I like writing code ... ONLY!

Boy do I have some bad news for you...

Re: I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

#80

Post by jungturk »

falloutx wrote: post #11
ikjasdlk2234 wrote: post #2

My path went from engineering-aligned (math) to engineering management back to engineering to product to program management to solutions engineering to account executive. Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though…

Sales is amazing but if your companies sales people require engineering to build POCs a lot of the times or always have to sell some custom solutions, then it wastes a lot of resources and it usually indicates the company is losing product market fit.

Sometimes, but if your product is a platform (or anything beyond a niche solution in a broader problem domain) then you're going to spend some time showing people how to make it work best for them.
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