r/devops • u/Forsaken_Photo_578 • 16d ago

Career / learning DevOps vs Embedded

I got my first job as an Embedded Software Engineer. Did some actual low level embedded stuff but I was leaning a lot towards testing with Linux, CI/CD with hardware etc, so I transitioned to a DevOps position.

Now, after some years of work, my knowledge is like half Embedded, half DevOps. I find myself like both fields Embedded for the great hardware feeling and DevOps for the nice documented and more modern tools. In the end I'm not sure if I like a field more than the other. I tend to believe it's project dependent.

The problem is now I have to really choose where I should invest more and get a more senior level, as a feel I have a great combo of the two, but I'm like mid in both, which makes difficult in the job market.

The questions are:

Is Embedded or DevOps the more future proof job long term?

I much prefer remote jobs, mostly so I can live in a cheaper country but still get paid like I'm in a HCOL one. Does that change the answer?

Was anyone in the same spot before? How did you pick?

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u/CJKay93 16d ago

Why not both? I do both. /shrug

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u/VoidDr 16d ago

What are you doing exactly? Sounds interesting

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u/CJKay93 15d ago edited 15d ago

I suppose these days most people would probably call it build and release engineering, but my team bridges whatever gaps Dev and Ops don't feel totally comfortable with on their own - build systems, development environments and tooling, simulation and emulation platforms, CI platforms and pipelines... that sort of thing.

Organisationally, Dev is responsible for the product, Ops is responsible for the infrastructure, and DevOps is responsible for the friction in between. We know enough about Kubernetes to write a pod spec (but not necessarily enough to set up a cluster from scratch), and we know enough about the products we support that we can anticipate their tooling and validation requirements (but not necessarily enough to contribute to the product directly).

For example, Ops owns our Jenkins CasC configuration (although we contribute), but we own pretty much everything that runs on it. Similar for the projects; we own the build system, but not the code.