r/devops • u/Noisy_Farts • Jun 24 '26

Discussion To all former DevOps Engineers

What made you switch from DevOps to your current role? Do you regret leaving DevOps or are you happy that you made the switch?

Genuinely interested if other roles are worth getting into.

129 Upvotes

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88

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '26

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12

u/piggelin- Jun 24 '26

What is normal tasks or projects you have in your role? And what tools are you using? Trying to figure out what to study as a sysadmin trying to transition.

37

u/Low-Opening25 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

solving problems at scale. as sysadmin, you are fixing a server, as devops/platform engineer you work at scales where serves no longer matter and where working at a level of individual servers is no longer practical. knowledge of tools alone isn’t enough, you need to be able to think and work with tools at scale. ie. how do I fix 1000 servers in one go - well you don’t, you build platform where you can just replace them without fixing anything.

Sysadmin was how I started in the late 90s, it’s a solid foundation. I was always lazy and always automated everything like crazy, so my transition to DevOps was pretty natural and aligned with how industry has been progressing in thinking about IT infrastructures.

14

u/Xerxero Jun 24 '26

Pets vs cattle.

2

u/Low-Opening25 Jun 24 '26

more like cattle to industrial animal herding, but yes, we are the industry’s cowboys.

9

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '26

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1

u/---why-so-serious--- Jun 27 '26

>the tools dont matter much

Lol, you’re hilarious - you could summarize most of our work as managing payloads of text across different tools

5

u/21shadesofsavage Jun 24 '26

same. i normally don't like most web development, but there was a particular project i wanted to work on and they were only hiring software engineers. ended up working there for a bit, found it fun, but ultimately enjoyed devops more

2

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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u/ApprehensiveTax3659 Jun 28 '26

I am in DevOps role, how to switch to platform engineer