Ask HN: What’s Next?

Appreciate any feedback from fellow HN folks.

Have been a web developer/engineer for 10-15 years now. Have a great stable job, but not 100% loving the work.

Recently switched jobs and increased my pay over 100%, but it’s really not about the money. While it’s amazing that companies are paying this, not sure if this ticket type of work is for me. I would say I’m loyal and prefer working on one solid goal for a company. The current company I work with has me split on a few projects and the context switching is very difficult. I’d ultimately like to move to DevOps, and there seems to be a path towards that, but not anytime soon. Am I impatient?

I’ve also been considering completely moving away from tech. I love tech and building things, but the longer I work in development and engineering, the harder it is to keep focus and justify the time vs the compensation for all the time in front of a screen.

My life has been tech and making things (outdoors) as a hobby for quite a few years. Working on physical projects has been an antidote to sitting on my rear all week.

Wouldn't a DevOps role have more context switching?

Yes, at best in DevOps you might get to work a project for a day or two before being yanked in a completely different direction.

I currently have to juggle Build & Release Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, monitoring tools, Building images, Configuration management, some DB admin. The context switching is almost a defining feature of modern DevOPS/Operations/SysAdmin/Infrastructure Engineer jobs, unless you are working in a pretty big company that allows you to specialise.

On the other hand if you get a job dealing with only build pipelines or only Kubernetes maintenance it will get boring in a while. Best is to rotate between projects, and have different team members build expertise on some area.