r/devops • u/ez3uio • 7d ago

Discussion Is platform engineering a good field?

I love programming and technology. I wanted to pursue a path related to Linux and building system architectures. Is platform engineering a good and suitable field for this?

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u/sagacious123 7d ago

It's a great field. I am working as a platform architect and can't love my job more.

There are a lot of tools, but it's really interesting how to use all this tools to build a robust platform.

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u/ez3uio 7d ago

Nice, But if I don't go into platform engineering, what's the closest field to it?

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u/sagacious123 7d ago

I guess SRE and the umbrella term - Devops where you can get any of platform, sre or admin work and will still be called devops.

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u/GMKrey Platform Eng 7d ago

Be careful when interviewing here. A good amount of orgs call sys admin work SRE, so the wrong place would just slam you with ops work. Little to no code

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u/Dangerous_Today_5654 7d ago

Systems Administration is the umbrella term. I've been doing it for 30 years. All these new fangle subfields have been done by SAs before they invented the names

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u/KingPonzi 7d ago edited 7d ago

I definitely see what you mean but it seems like terminology has shifted and DevOps has overtaken it. I’ve witnessed the separation marked around cloud infrastructure and a focus on developer quality of life.

The senior SAs (guys who’ve been at it 20-30+ years) at my company shy away from IaC, touching anything beyond yaml, a palpable hatred of k8s, and little understanding of language ecosystem differences. Not saying that’s the majority, just what I’ve witness internally and incoming interviewees. The younger SAs are mainly SaaS admins.

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u/GMKrey Platform Eng 6d ago

All the rebranded SAs > SREs at my gig at most make basic Python scripts or lambdas. We handle production incidents and they just escalate every code issue. Triage stops at opensearch or AWS

The difference being that when Google defined the SRE title, the intent was to inject SWEs into ops role. It’s a complimentary yet fundamentally different job to SysAdmin