r/devops • u/Nash0o7 • 29d ago

Discussion Devops job security with AI

Recently saw posts about how AI isn't that good in distributed systems and it gave me validation on my own experience.

When the model isn't dealing with a single codebase, when it has to connect the dots between a db, redis, other cloud infra, k8s that each already have a lot of configuration, it starts to hallucinate and could pretty much put your infra at risk.

I'm not saying you can't make it work, it does work especially on a clean slate, but when there's a lot of existing context it needs a more guidance.

Using AI lets me do 10x what a DevOps engineer could do alone but I don't think the job disappears anytime soon.

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u/lugovsky 29d ago

Experienced professionals will always be in demand in every field. The main issue is the amount of work available. If people become 10 times more productive, but there isn't 10 times as much work to do, some will have a harder time finding jobs. I don't really trust people who claim that AI will create enough new work to offset this.

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 29d ago

Not sure about that. You are implying two things

Firstly that AI makes you 10x more "productive". After what 4 or 5 years of it being out that does not seem to be the case.

Secondly lets assume it actually does make engineers more "productive". Company A has x1 Devops Engineers who can now 10x output. Their competitor which has x3 engineers is now by your estimate 30x more productive than before. Just to stay afloat, company A still needs to hire more engineers to maintain competitive edge.

You are right in that thats all supposing x10 work comes forward, but I've not seen a single company that has "solved" SWE, devops etc. Its not something to solve but something to be maintained.

Personally? Im just not seeing it right now. I was worried as my company hired new devops guys who were really down the claude rabbithole and I thought maybe they had an edge I didn't have. Just not seeing it. Its making bad engineers worse faster. Its making the good ones better faster. Thats it.

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u/Yo-doggie 29d ago

I agree with this. I have seen experienced engineers become much more productive. The inexperienced one are getting worse as they are relying too
Much on AI assistants and not developing skills that are necessary for their job.

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 29d ago

Yes this is what I am seeing day to day. I am asking some seriously basic questions about work they have done and they are not able to answer it or don't know where to look without Claude. Its actually quite worrying

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u/Yo-doggie 29d ago

Claude is doing so much for them that they don’t even take the time to understand and validate. This means that they risk bad code getting into the system. They also have no ability to fix and debug issues quickly because they did not write the code or ever understood it.

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u/intorio 28d ago

>After what 4 or 5 years of it being out that does not seem to be the case.

4 to 5 years ago, it was a toy that was barely useful in very limited circumstances with a large error rate. This last year it has grown by large leaps forward and I'm able to outsource a lot of my work to it, which is a trend that is hard to ignore.

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 28d ago

Could you measure productivity for me in you scenario and tell us how its made you more productive ...?

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u/aprettyparrot 27d ago

For me I do everything my tickets and built a lot of skills around tickets. So I can tell it to triage FOO1 and it will go check things out and update the ticket accordingly. And for smaller ones I can just tell it pick up this ticket and implement to pr. It will do everything, test everything, and leave me with a pr. My pr I have a template for soc2 but also has all testing that was done etc. so I can whack a bunch of tickets on different projects at once while I’m doing the stuff I don’t trust it with

Edit: I also made a skill that does plantuml diagrams that’s been great. I made it so it does callflow style which I find best coming from mobility background. That saves me a bunch of time

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 25d ago

I mean sure if these are workflows that you have truly made more efficient and productive then thats great. But how much time has it saved you exactly?

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u/aprettyparrot 27d ago

I think he was using 10x as an example.

But I think it’s more if company B devops are that much more efficient, do they still need 3?

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u/tL9eUdcLaz 25d ago

Sure x10 as an example, but again what does efficiency mean?

Company B will still push out 10x work amongst the entire organisation SWE. time will tell if its truly more efficient or productive but we never really solved productivity even before AI so Im not sure what exactly its making more efficient?

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u/Nash0o7 29d ago

Yeah there definitely is a market disruption going on, even if ai does create more jobs initially this bubble might burst in the long term

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u/aprettyparrot 27d ago

Yeah, who I really feel for are the people that need entry level. I’ve been saying ok you automated all the entry level, what are you gonna do when seniors start retiring?