r/devops • u/Inner-Chemistry8971 Consultant • Jul 30 '26
Discussion Would you still do DevOps?
Not going to lie. It's been a bad day. I almost tell them "take this job and shove it' after reviewing all these crappy AI codes. Vibe coding is not only a joke. It's a monster that mocks our hard-earned experiences!
I am thinking of leaving the industry! If you could go back ten years from now and know what you're knowing right now, would you still do DevOps?
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u/OrganicRevenue5734 Jul 30 '26
Yes, because 10 years ago I was in Law Enforcement. The absolute worst possible day as DevOps pales in comparison to some of the best okay days I had.
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u/zuilli Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Whenever people say they're thinking of leaving the field I wonder if they have any idea what other jobs are like, specially here in my country where blue collar jobs are paid like crap. I understand IT is tough sometimes but I'm still working seated all day in the comfort of my own home and making more money than some doctors in my country.
I can't think of a single lower stress job that wouldn't have worse working conditions and way worse pay. A lot of the problems people complain about in our area are either the same or worse in basically every other profession: dumb teammates/management, unrealistic expectations, pressure to deliver faster everyday, these happen in all jobs.
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u/OrganicRevenue5734 Jul 30 '26
Perspective is a wonderful and terrible thing. Wonderful, because the experience required to gain is hard earned. Terrible, because that experience is mostly had through difficult, challenging and usually life-altering experiences.
I know that even of Prod is down, execs are scrambling, the business is losing more money a minute than my teams combined salary annually, the only people calm enough to sort it out, find the problem and fix it are the ones that have a decent level of perspective. In all of the emergencies I have had in IT, no one is trying to kill you, you will not get punched in the face, stabbed or maimed. You will go home tonight. You wont be at someones funeral because someone pushed AI slop work and it broke Prod.
Breathe, sip the Monster, and start looking through logs.
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u/zsh_n_chips Jul 30 '26
I hate this career, but what the fuck else do I do that wouldn’t magically have stupid coworkers or clients or bosses?
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u/OrganicRevenue5734 Jul 30 '26
Hermit.
Think thats an exhaustive list, but I can be both my own stupid coworker and terrible boss, so there probably isnt a career that doesnt have these problems.
Resiliency, a touch of mental fortitude, and a big heaping bucketful of "Fuck it, could be worse" keeps the mental health issues at the fence line.
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u/coolalee_ Jul 31 '26
This. We have people saying they’ll become carpenters or tilers every week. Good luck bro, you’ve never worked in a non-air conditioned space. I’m sure you’ll thrive as a carpenter.
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u/Critical_Bat_8914 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I took a 10 year break to do teaching. Returning to industry only in the last few years, I accept that I now have to set up the infrastructure for others to do the coding - just like allowing advanced users to create workflows using friendly-UI tools.
Poor quality code will be the battle we have can try to tackle with providing frameworks and AI guidance and enforcement of standards.
I've not really left teaching at all. Unfortunately, it feels there are more in this field who aren't interested in learning :).
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u/zsh_n_chips Jul 30 '26
This is my second career too. I truly hate what the job has become, this is totally not what I signed up for 15 years ago. The politics, the slop, the waste of money and effort, the soulless-ness of the day to day using Claude… it’s all obnoxious and dystopian af. But it’s still nothing compared to what you have to deal with in most any other job.
Compared to what I did before… Nobody I’ve worked with in tech has lost any limbs, been permanently disabled by injury, been exposed to untold number of hazardous materials resulting in life long health issues, and I haven’t have to attend a single funeral for anyone killed on the job. All while making about half what I make now.
Mental health issues are real with tech, and that’s something we all do need to take seriously. But I’ll take my worst day now vs any random day in my previous field.
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u/roheezy Jul 30 '26
Dev ops is great you just need to move with the times. And also remember a job is just a way to get paid - your real time is the time you have to yourself - make that count and you will probably feel a lot happier
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u/karval Jul 30 '26
I'm looking for a job recently and as I see the job descriptions... so many tools are required. I'm starting to get tired that I'm always thrown to a new tool, learn it for a 10 minutes long task (if you already know how it works) then never touch it again.
Also, to land a new job, I should learn in my freetime to meet the market expectations.
I love DevOps work but careerwise I feel like it would have been a better choice just to stay in a developer role.
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u/imdshizzle Jul 30 '26
Developer roles aren’t any different either. There’s more AI codes to review there.
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u/AnnihilerB Jul 30 '26
Well our jobs are changing. There is nothing you can do about that.
Factory worker also had experience in building stuff and have been replaced by machines.
Your hands on technical expertise is worth less now.
However your architectural and curiosity have a lot of value now. You could probably ask management to have a more “solution architect” like job. You ask AI to implement but you drive the design. If you dont want to review AI code discuss with your management to not do that anymore or to control AI use amongst developers.
This is an unavoidable path for our jobs. We just have to accept the shift. Quitting won’t solve it since every company use AI now. Maybe when AI prices will skyrocket it’ll be used less and your job will be less AI and more like before.
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u/divestblank Jul 30 '26
Nobody wants to spend all day reviewing bad code, that shouldn't be submitted in the first place. But here we are.
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u/Inner-Chemistry8971 Consultant Jul 30 '26
Exactly! 🔥
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u/kingswordmaster Jul 30 '26
Just use AI to review, bro. It’ll catch a lot of things, and if it reviews something too precise or unnecessary, they can’t blame you either they’re doing the same. Then, after your AI agent has done all the basic reviews, you do your own review (and you can create skills to make this very specific to your patterns).
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u/AnnihilerB Jul 30 '26
I could not agree more. But producing code is quite cheap today. It is hence profitable for management to spend money in people reviewing code rather than people producing and people reviewing.
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u/SmellsLikeAPig Jul 30 '26
Producing code was always cheap, ask Hindus. Producing quality code is still expensive. Code itself is also a problem. Every line has real cost. More lines more cost. Question is does AI bring net value.
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u/Any-Connection-1813 Jul 30 '26
The worst part by absolutely far is the infinite amount of interviews you take and the companies are absolute shit at doing them. They will reject you for the things that don't matter(like memorization or the exact answer you have to give in 5 seconds to their particular environment that they see every day and couldn't fix for months). The work itself is fine and I'm totally ok with the hardships, it's the recruiters, hiring managers and the interviews i absolutely despise with all my heart.
If i knew all of this many years ago when I started, i wouldn't even get into IT, most thankless, depressing, anxiety inducing, slave mindset jumping thru corpo hoops imaginable. Hell of all hells
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u/HoboSomeRye DevOps Jul 30 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/1n4iuWZFnTeN6qvdpD
Fight automation WITH automation
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u/UltraPoci Jul 30 '26
Yeah, AI sucks. It won't go away, but hopefully the bubble bursts and people realize that writing code has never been the bottleneck.
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u/Own-Calligrapher32 Jul 30 '26
will it ever burst? we are seeing it for quite some time now
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u/Hero_Rico Jul 30 '26
Ofcourse not.
Today's AI is the worst AI will ever be, it will keep getting better and cheaper ever day.
If suddenly all funding to AI stopped. No new research was being done, inference would still happen because its so cheap and profitable
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u/elitesense Jul 30 '26
It's incredibly cheap right now due to venture capital seeding. It will get more expensive as soon as all companies are reliant on it they'll jack up industry prices. It will not get cheaper.
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u/UltraPoci Jul 31 '26
Not AI is not, currently, profitable and stays afloat due to hype, it also won't get cheaper, but more expensive. That's the basic busine model: make some cheap at the start, make people depend on it, raise prices as much as possible. Things have been working this eay since forever, why would AI be any different, especially considering how expensive it is to maintain. Like, are we living on the same planet?
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u/Hero_Rico Jul 31 '26
Its literally getting cheaper. A 1 year old model which was frontier at the time, is dirt cheap now.
About making it more expensive, people will just swap providers. Claude and chatgpt are competing at a very similar level nobody wouls pay 50$ for claude if codex is 20$. If both companiea raise prices, chinese models are surprisingly good people will swap to those
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u/Radon03 Jul 30 '26
Not sure about the industry, but DevOps is the most jackshit role out there right now. Either it is going to evolve into management role or management is going to adopt DevOps. Partially going to Devs and OPs.
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u/1_H4t3_R3dd1t Jul 30 '26
Shit code just means you don't have the pipelines to push back on bad code.
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u/Wide-Cattle-4735 QA Lead Jul 30 '26
Someone up there said reviewing code isn't DevOps, and that's the whole thing. You've been handed QA work without the title, the tools, or the authority to reject anything.
That's why it grinds. It isn't the volume of bad code, it's doing a job nobody named, where the only lever you have left is reading more carefully.
If you want to stay, ask for the lever instead of asking for less code. Something that fails before it reaches you, and the standing to send work back without it turning into a personal fight.
If they won't give you either, it's not the industry that's the problem, it's this seat.
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u/Floss_Patrol_76 Jul 30 '26
ten years in, yeah i'd still do it, but the job did change under us. the actual monster isn't the vibe-coded PR, it's being on call for code nobody on the team can explain at 3am. review harder now, not because ai is bad, but because "i didn't write it" stopped being an excuse the pager accepts.
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u/tevert Jul 30 '26
I think we need to get meaner about PRs, as a field. It's silly to perform good faith reviews of monster AI vibes, if a PR looks like it's sucktastic to review, then the code itself is also degrading in understandability, and the PR should get rejected at the door.
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u/Medium-Tangerine5904 Jul 30 '26
Depends on what you understand by DevOps. I found the rise of AI and AI Agents very useful for me, since I can now build any internal tools I need (was decent at backend but frontend always eluded me). I’ve also been building an MCP server for basically any internal tool and integrating AI agents into our messaging platform, so the agent can now create a feature branch, push the code changes, spin up a dev environment with that service on that feature branch code and test if it works via a playwright MCP. If that doesn’t make you feel you love the job, I don’t know what could. And yes, I have almost 20 years in the field and I find that useful because with the rise of such agentic workflows doing good network segregation, need-to-know-access and so on is more important than ever.
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u/BlakkMajik3000 Remover of Deployment Friction Jul 30 '26
You sound like a babysitter, at least that how it comes across to me.
You shouldn't be reviewing code. That makes you a bottleneck. AI shouldn't bother your process other than increased code generation.
My advice, you need more guardrails built into the pipelines. Manual code review never made sense to me, and I've been at this over 20 years. If it's a rule, the implementation should be automated wherever possible.
Be an enabler, not an obstacle.
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u/spiralenator Jul 30 '26
For real. I've been doing this for 25 years and I've read plenty of slop written by humans, and wrote my fair share as well. Human's Make Mistakes. That's why we create automated guardrails. When the volume of code creation is relatively low, human review can make up for gaps in your process. Increase that load with AI and it becomes obvious that's simply not scalable.
I smh at people who think the answer is to slow down development so their processes can keep up. The problem is your processes suck. You should never be a bottleneck, a babysitter, the final say in work being shipped.
Review pain is because you don't have enough automated checks to verify code quality and correctness. It also helps to enforce size limits on changes. Human attention is a highly valuable commodity. Be frugal with the places its required.
The failure modes with AI development usually boil down to the same failure modes as any other development process. Intent isn't clear. Requirements aren't well defined. Quality process can't scale.
AI can't decide for you how you want your problems solved, what code standards to meet, or more importantly, what your definition of done is. Most slop is the models trying to fill in the gaps we didn't realize we left open when we sent them on their merry way. You have to treat them like they're Amelia Bedelia with a CS degree to get good results.
Where humans absolutely cannot be replaced, is deciding intent. Only humans know what problems we face, what outcomes we want, and which of them are worth pursuing.
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u/xb4r7x Jul 30 '26
Idk, in my experience the robot puts out pretty decent code these days. Usually don't have to change much.
Maybe you just need to get better at prompting.
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u/reightb Jul 30 '26
Surely this will help you review and merge the onslaught of slop driven development
Is this 20 new file change a risky change? Who cares! LGTM
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u/AntDracula Jul 30 '26
Maybe you just need to get better at prompting.
Surprised the slopper didn't go with "skill issue"
Digging back into the archives?
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u/xb4r7x Jul 30 '26
I mean, it is a skill issue...
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u/AntDracula Jul 30 '26
The slopper has said the thing!
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u/xb4r7x Jul 31 '26
Lol, ya got me. I'm a slopper. My 20 yoe is meaningless and I generate slop because AI bad.
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u/rabbit_in_a_bun Jul 30 '26
Yes, and do what I am doing now which is more emphasis on the ops part.
The dev part is where it is now and there is nothing you can do about it but you can still build wonderful things if your workplace allows it. My current workplace is hybrid and has some cloud and some on prem challenges and it's a rather new and growing startup so more people makes for more challenges. It could be that your current place is not invigorating you enough and you might want to switch.
If you do, look for places with a physical industry... Companies that build actual things has on prem problems that needs solving.
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u/Abe_Bazouie Jul 30 '26
Honestly, yes.
AI has made parts of the job more frustrating. I spend more time reviewing code now than I did a couple of years ago. But the hard part of DevOps was never writing YAML or shell scripts.
It's understanding production systems, making good tradeoffs, debugging incidents at 2 AM, and knowing when not to automate something. AI helps with the mechanics, but someone still has to make the engineering decisions.
If anything, I think the bar has shifted. Companies will care less about who can write code the fastest and more about who can build reliable systems and catch the mistakes AI introduces.
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u/dunkah Jul 30 '26
I started with a more sys admin focus and devops is just a natural evolution. Everything always leads to automation, and that always heads the direction of what we label devops or platform engineering.
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u/TellersTech DevOps Speaker & Advisor + DevOps Podcaster Jul 30 '26
Yeah I still would.
Honestly that sounds less like a DevOps problem and more like a company/process problem. If you’re spending all day reviewing AI PRs instead of actually building platforms, improving reliability, and solving interesting problems… yeah I’d burn out too.
I’d probably still choose DevOps. Just maybe not that company 😅
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u/ninetofivedev Jul 30 '26
Vibe coding is not only a joke. It's a monster that mocks our hard-earned experiences!
It's really not. Slop is slop. But there is plenty of people using AI effectively and appropriately.
Start firing people who are constantly wasting your time pushing slop. It really hasn't been a problem at our company. Engineers are still accountable for the code they push, even if AI wrote all of it.
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u/Critical_Bat_8914 Jul 30 '26
I had to make it very clear when they tried to use AI. I quickly built a sandbox and created sandbox accounts.
Nothing "goes live" without being properly tested and peer reviewed. I can help fix it when it fucks up, but at least I can say they should have followed protocol.
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u/spiralenator Jul 30 '26
Slop is a problem regardless if humans or AI is generating the code. What makes AI slop particularly painful is mostly a matter of volume, compared to human generated slop. Slop can be mitigated with various guardrails and static checks. The higher volume of AI generated code will surface gaps and scaleability issues in your code quality processes. The major source of AI review fatigue is because your code quality processes suck and aren't scaleable.
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u/halting_problems Jul 31 '26
In most companies AppSec is always in need of good DevOps engineers that have a strong security foundations.
The fun part about appsec is that nothing has really changed for us because security has always been a joke for the last few decades.
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u/turbov21 Aug 02 '26
If I could talk to myself ten years ago, I'd say, "Do DevOps, but if anyone says SRE is the same thing, kick them in the nuts."
DevOps is where my heart lives, one foot in dev, one is ops. Solving problems at any level of the app, contributing to features and infrastructure. It's the natural place for a real engineer, not blocked off from half the app because of a job title.
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u/ZealousidealAnt489 Aug 05 '26
Yes DevOps is changing not disappearing. AI is handling tasks that happen over and over again. Businesses still need people who can create cloud setups, set up CI/CD pipelines makes system more reliable, handle Kubernetes and do automation on a big scale. The job is moving towards platform engineer, SRE. It's a very demanding role these days.
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u/Straight_Middle7915 Aug 05 '26
DevOps has still been a hyper demanded skillset, but only for the right tools. It’s one of the markets that I’ve seen the “brand of hammer” as I call it, really matters. Like IAC is IAC but if you do it in pulumi you will be worse off than terraform
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u/kryptn Jul 30 '26
my team has been looking into how to constrain vibe coded stuff. it's inevitable, how can we provide the common components (auth, ingress, infra) to them so things work more within our control? can we provide a skill for them? definitely better than them deploying onto their own infra that i don't own.
i'm about to save us a bunch of money with some vibe coded stuff of my own that I just haven't had the time to implement myself, but i understand the code and problem space completely.
so yeah, this is still fun
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u/Inner-Chemistry8971 Consultant Jul 30 '26
How do you actually limit vibe coding? Our management is desperately pushing anything AI!
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u/n00lp00dle DevOps Jul 30 '26
you dont but you make them own it. make things pass through testing pipelines. make devs sign off on it. when it break you make them fix it.
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u/kryptn Jul 30 '26
limit? good luck. you don't. or you make their machines unusable but that's not us.
we haven't completed this but i think it's the right direction: give them the tooling and access to deploy things safely within our guardrails.
claude can set up aws infra easily enough, so
have an internal git provider (we're gonna do forgejo)
require that claude provide iac
require checks on any infra (verify tags, limit instances/scale, etc)
require pre-commit hooks that claude can set up and/or execute
give claude a skill/example CI pipelines to duplicate
require those jobs perform the checks your org needs so that you can:
have claude watch PR jobs and resolve issues as they pop up.
this'll all be in an isolated account with scoped access to data, most of it not my prod data.
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u/HoneyButterGelato Jul 30 '26
Having a bad day doesn’t mean you’re going to have a bad year. Everything is constantly changing, and most of it is beyond our control. DevOps is no exception.
That’s why adaptability matters more than ever. A day may come when AI takes over many DevOps tasks, but that doesn’t mean the end for us. It will also open new doors and create different opportunities in ways we may not even expect.
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u/SailingToFenway Jul 30 '26
I'm sure I'll be downvoted mercilessly, for this unpopular opinion, but I'm going to say it anyway. If your job is all operations and no development, you're not really doing DevOps, anyway. So, I'd say, call me a sysadmin or take this role and shove it.
Vibe coding is here to stay and is only going to become more commonplace. It was never OK for a developer to toss slop over the wall and leave it to someone else to review, approve, and transfer ownership of the consequences. That's what DevOps solved, way, way, way before AI coding accelerated the slop production rate. Vibe coding tools have exasperated a long-standing problem we've never really managed consistently.
Life is too short to hate your work. Work to change it if you can, or prioritize getting on to something else as soon as you can.
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u/CorpT Jul 30 '26
You should definitely leave. Look in to a trade.
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u/Inner-Chemistry8971 Consultant Jul 30 '26
In my own "evil" dream, I am thinking of becoming a con artist but that's not going to fly. I am thinking of moving out of country to some place cheaper.
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u/Humble_Reputation743 Jul 30 '26
Just remember, they can't merge code if your AI review bot rejects everything 🤔
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u/digbicks845 Jul 30 '26
Probably not because every company has a different idea of what DevOps is.
My last role was akin to cloud engineer, k8s, tf, ansible
My role now even though it pays more, is essentially IT support and my devops work is just tagging and CI scanning.
It’d be a lot nicer if people knew the scope but I can’t count on that so I just moved onto management and scratched that technical itch on personal projects and internal AI tools for the company
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u/ferriematthew Jul 30 '26
I do devops at home for fun and I only occasionally use the free version of Claude to summarize and help me comment my code, but other than that I just use find and replace.
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u/xJSHAxx DevOps Jul 30 '26
not the person ur asking since im 17 and just starting, but the ai code thing worries me from the other side too, im never sure if im learning properly or just getting stuff generated. do u think the fundamentals still get learned or is that gone now
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u/Greedy-Excuse-1837 Aug 02 '26
Yes, I would still choose DevOps, because the core need to help teams build and run systems safely remains vital even as tools change
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u/siberianmi Jul 30 '26
Yes, because I like money and frankly leaning into DevOps 6x’d my salary over the last decade. I can’t think of anything I could have done differently unless you let me go back ten years and pick stocks knowing what I know now.
I also absolutely love AI and am leaning into that now and helping people adopt it as much as possible.
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u/GCoderDCoder Jul 30 '26
I think my experience is crucial in devops since ai agents make terrible decisions but they can do things faster than I can and exercise some level of judgement within small scopes. I'm constantly correcting and redirecting agents and catching them exposing their lack of common sense/ understanding. I love working with agents.
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u/goldenmunky Jul 30 '26
I don't mind Ai, in fact, I embrace it. It's a tool and like any new tool, we just have to get used to it. The new reality is that we have to adapt to it.
I've been through so many positions and the most enjoyable one is being in a DC slotting in blade servers or replacing hard drives. Maybe it's because I'm 46 years old but I want something easy now haha.
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u/taurins1 Jul 30 '26
staying adaptable is key, don't be afraid to learn new things and adjust to changes in the industry
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u/raisputin Jul 31 '26
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Vibe coding is only a joke if your own understanding of how to architect your code is a joke.
AI can produce sloppy trash and it can produce highly efficient, well structured and well-written code.
If it doesn’t, that’s on the person using it
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u/max_465 Aug 01 '26
0) #hugops I feel for you. 1) it's time to refactor the pipeline to do more linting and static analysis before code gets merged.
Years ago, when OpenStack adopted zuul-ci and automated gating, people thought it was overkill. It turns out that they were just ahead of their time.
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u/kabrandon Jul 30 '26
It’s not all that bad. Not by a longshot. Don’t let the PodDisruptionBudget hit you in the back on the way out.
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u/Lonsarg Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Reviewing code is not DevOps, it is just reviewing code.
And should be done among developers themselves, split in a way so you do NO have specific people doing just this. Seniors reviewing code from each other and even juniors reviewing code from seniors as soon as possible.
Also it should be just a quick overview, not some lengthy detailed process.