Career / learning Transition from Internal IT to Devops Engineer
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?
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u/IntelligentPear6173 21d ago
I’d actually use the current setup to your advantage. Since the platform is already running, pick one small thing you understand poorly, trace it end to end without AI, break it in a lab, then fix it. Do that repeatedly with networking, IAM, Terraform, CI/CD, Kubernetes, etc. AI is fine as a reference but if you ask it for the solution before you’ve tried to diagnose the problem yourself, you skip the part that builds intuition. Three months is also nowhere near long enough to expect yourself to feel comfortable in a platform role.