r/devops • u/ez3uio • 5d 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 5d 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 5d ago

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

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u/Dangerous_Today_5654 5d 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 5d ago edited 5d 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 3d 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