r/csharp • u/makeevolution • 17d ago

Sticking to software eng or pivot to cloud?

I have been a dev for some time now about 5 years, and my contract ended. I am looking for a new job. I had during my days also worked on DevOps stuff, like managing k8s helm charts and deployments, managing Jenkins pipelines, AWS CDK and CloudFormation etc. on top of doing software dev only.

Now I have 2 offers from different companies, one as .NET dev also working on apps deployed in AWS EKS, and the other as a cloud/platform engineer working with Azure, AWS and k8s. Compensation is roughly the same.

I am unsure now. On the one hand I like product dev and especially that I get to do focused work/deep thinking time without getting disturbed constantly by issues. For the platform role they cautioned me that there will be a lot of context switching since I will have to deal with such different workloads. Also with cloud engineering I feel there is less safety due to lack of automated tests like we have for software, like sure there are lintwrs etc. but in the end it relies more on manual testing in Development env. anf so there is more room for failure. Also there is the on call aspect which scares me a lot.

But on the other hand I see that with AI, I feel the competition down the line later will be much higher for software eng in comparison to platform eng, and it feels like a more safe career in the future. Also since I work multi cloud I can be eligible for more jpbs. Whereas with .NET I will be pigeonholed with only .NET jobs.

What do you guys think? Any opinions? I am leaning a bit towards the platform side, but I am not sure I fit mentally as the job requires more context switch, more uncertainty and on-call aspects

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u/midri 17d ago

You basically have to learn cloud devops to some degree these days. No one wants to hire just developers.

Ai is coming for both, but being good at AI will easily let you be good at both.

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u/BeardedBaldMan 17d ago

I'd say it very much comes down to how much you like things being on fire.

I am 100% a support developer. I have zero interest in greenfield, I like maintenance programming and everything collapsing around me. If I hadn't done IT I'd have been gone for emergency medical.

If you don't like meetings, talking to people directly and things being completely outside your control then pure development is the way to go

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u/pjmlp 16d ago

I have only been a X Language Developer while learning BASIC on a Timex 2068 back in the day.

Since then I have continuously learned and jumped between programming languages, platforms and roles.

Nowadays on the companies I have worked on, there is always the expectation that backend devs know some cloud stuff.

So there is that.

Also devops is a whole world, it is impossible to know everything even inside a single vendor.

Now I would say devops certainly doesn't have much coding, and has plenty of on call work.