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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

#81

Post by mancerayder »

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…

How would one go from devops or sre management to a customer facing pre sales role like you described?

I thought sales was a separate career path.

I relate 100 percent to your realization about competing with 25 year olds on Leetcode. I'm comfortable, but I realize finding a new job is harder than ever, even though I am as valuable as ever - they want me not only to have proven I can 10x a company managing infra and people (I did and have), but they expect me to spend my weekends coding, and not just coding but coding esoteric algorithms than no one uses outside of academia.

And meanwhile there's an enormous amount of messages here on HN about how managers are useless and mean.

It's a weird spot to be in, so I'm opting for trying to prepay mortgages as quickly as humanly possible before I'm unemployed forever and have to call it retirement (and which might have to take place in a cheaper foreign country).

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

#82

Post by mancerayder »

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…

How do you get to sales from engineering? Must it take place laterally in the same company, or did you sell yourself differently to recruiters, or did you know someone?

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

#83

Post by mancerayder »

k__ wrote: post #73
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can hate coding and be an excellent network engineer or even DBA.

I'm an infrastructure guy and I learned to code, but I don't code today. The other poster who talked about good people in the old days using Perl and suchlike tools is right. Competent people care about automation.

But there are all sorts of automation tools that don't require knowing how to write object oriented code or do a ton of code reviews. Terraform is one - it's yaml, and the complexity is one of design patterns. Another is Ansible. GitHub Actions. Many many more.

Let me throw out a grenade. Software developers often over estimate their capabilities in technology. Because a person is an expert in Ruby or Go, and on the weekend they stood up a hosted app on ECS, now magically they're geniuses and understand DevOps.

False. DevOps engineering, network engineering, DBA, and a lot of other non-developer jobs take 5-10 years to get right.

Hopefully I've slammed our Leetcode hiring practices, but really I'm just venting at this point.

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

#84

Post by mancerayder »

Roark66 wrote: post #56

My path was opposite... Started in early 200x sysadmining Linux boxes. Moved to an MS gold partner that started with 6 employees and ended up with 45 by the time I left. So you can imagine the kind of work and solutions we did, started with mom and pop, ended up doing email systems for a 20k user system, also picked up vmware/sphere, perl scripting a big monitoring system for over a year and hacking old binary only l…

How can I pay you to tell me your secret path to consulting in DevOps?

I'd love to do this or SRE type consulting. However, every organization I've worked with (including finance and government) use big name big business consulting shops, supposedly for liability reasons, and it would be impossible to get a small consulting contract unless you had family members in the C suite.

Moreover, what stops that remote devops from taking place with highly qualified Hungarian or Polish or Portuguese engineers for 40 percent of the rate?

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

#85

Post by mancerayder »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #45
jeron wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devops means a lot of different things to different people

If you are a “DevOps engineer” - how is what you are doing any different from operations folk 25 years ago if you aren’t working with developers and embedded into their teams?

Help me understand this 'embedded in developer teams' in a larger company. Do you have no central infrastructure with centralized tooling, alerting, standards and knowledge?

Team A has a devops engineer, Teams B through F have one, how do they have any capacity to pursue long term strategical projects, save money and operational effort with centralized hosting and tooling, and basically have some autonomy, when they are enslaved to a Scrum Master and some hokey pokey Fibonacci numbers and T Shirt Size nonsense having to argue priorities in every Sprint against people who don't care about operations?

That's what embedded devops is to me - an operational role enslaved to dev leads, the poor guy who has to troubleshoot a failed release while the devs are at the bar.

Unless my straw man is wildly off, no thanks to that embedded stuff.

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

#86

Post by dddw »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #51

What in god's name is the meaning of the image on their homepage? It looks like a conceptual, digital rendering of a colonoscopy. https://infisical.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.c...

:D Yes, we demand an explanation!

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

#87

Post by vmatsiiako »

bstsb wrote: post #69

side note, i absolutely love Infisical’s self-hosted offering. it’s really easy to get set up with and aside from a few minor problems with their Universal Auth, i had it working in production in just a few days. it’s made secret management a lot easier, especially across different environments! i’m aware that there are limits on the free plan, but as a single user i haven’t hit any crazy restrictions

Really glad to hear that! What problems did you have with Universal Auth?

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

#88

Post by fuzzythinker »

nunez wrote: post #57

I made the jump into SE (sales/solution engineering) three years ago after a long career as a SRE/systems/software engineer (the kind that found any excuse to break out ilspy, windbg, gdb and/or tcpdump on the job) and have a love-hate relationship with it. This is a long post, but SEs are underrepresented here despite us being a big part of the sky high valuations that many companies on here have gotten, and it's a…

Thank you. Can't upvote you enough for the info.

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

#89

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mancerayder wrote: post #85
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a “DevOps engineer” - how is what you are doing any different from operations folk 25 years ago if you aren’t working with developers and embedded into their teams?

Help me understand this 'embedded in developer teams' in a larger company. Do you have no central infrastructure with centralized tooling, alerting, standards and knowledge? Team A has a devops engineer, Teams B through F have one, how do they have any capacity to pursue long term strategical projects, save money and operational effort with centralized hosting and tooling, and basically have some autonomy, when they…

That’s exactly what it means , a person who reports to the infrastructure team who decides standards and is embedded with the devs as part of the project.

If you are just throwing things over the fence - you’re an “operations” team and get none of the benefits of DevOps

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

#90

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

mancerayder wrote: post #83
k__ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can hate coding and be an excellent network engineer or even DBA. I'm an infrastructure guy and I learned to code, but I don't code today. The other poster who talked about good people in the old days using Perl and suchlike tools is right. Competent people care about automation. But there are all sorts of automation tools that don't require knowing how to write object oriented code or do a ton of code reviews. T…

It’s a red flag anytime I see a company with a dedicated “database administrator” usually they want you to put all of your business logic in stored procedures and have a dozen GetCustomer_n copies for versioning.

What can a modern operations person do that can automated anything via coding?

BTW: I am “expert” in cloud by any definition (did at a startup, worked at AWS ProServe, staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company) and I develop. How hard do you really think it is for someone with a developer mindset to learn how system design works at scale and bring their same developer mindset to infrastructure as code?

It took me exactly 2.5 years from opening the AWS console for the first time to being hired at AWS.

Everyone in my division at my current company at my level can hold their own as either a developer or a “senior cloud engineer”. We just find infrastructure babysitting incredibly boring

Half the reason I learned cloud was not because I didn’t want to manage servers - I didn’t want to deal with server administrations.

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