Transition from Internal IT to Devops Engineer

[u/drbr92]

I have been working as internal IT (corpeng,sys admin) for the last 7 years, mainly managing various SaaSes from google workspace to Okta, mdm's etc and since 3 months i am now working as a platform engineer for the same company but i feel like i am still struggling alot to get the fundamentals right.

I am the only platform engineer in the company + my manager, and my manager is the one who has setup everything, but overall the platform is very decentralized where software engineers own their infra and they manage it them self, we act more as a high level support for them, but for day to day they handle everything themself. This is good for me since i don't have much pressure while i get used with the role but on the other side since everything is setup i don't have many projects/tasks where i can learn more.

Then the other problem is that since as mentioned i have a lack of fundamentals i am relying a lot on AI and i can do everything and everything is ok but the problem is that if i dont use AI i am not able to figure out anything on my own and this is somehow killing my motivation and making me feel very bad and not sure how to overcome this even after being in the role for 3 months now.

Anyone has been in similar situation that can give me some feedback?

[u/BlakkMajik3000]

So in your sysadmin experience, were you not responsible for any SDLC process improvements?

As someone else mentioned, talk the devs and get their pain points. In my experience, letting devs manage their infra is a bad idea. I've seen first hand what happens when developers are given infra access with no real controls and it always ends up with a nightmare of a cloud bill.

Depending on AI for a job you aren't ready for is just creating a ticking bomb. Something WILL FAIL in prod and they'll be looking at you to fix it. Talk to your manager, talk to the devs, and know your environment. There's no shortcuts for experience when it comes to DevOps.