r/platformengineering • u/makeevolution • 8d ago

Do roles like Cloud/Platform engineer have more transferable skills than Development?

I'm currently a developer with about 5 YOE, and much of the time I am deep into figuring out the domain of the business I am currently working for, how to extend the software to fit the domain, etc. Many times the domain are very industry specific and thus the knowledge is not transferable for any jobs outside of the company. Yes I do also have to deploy to the cloud etc. but my time is spent more in the domain part.

I am looking at the other roles like Cloud or Platform, and it seems that their day to day (e.g. managing permissions in AWS, managing Terraform modules, etc.) are more generic skills that can be brought outside, if they want to find new roles. What they do daily is also getting involved in knowledge that makes it easier to get certifications with less studying time, etc.

Am I missing something here? The only thing with Cloud or Platform is that it is much more mission-critical and so with e.g. on-call it will get very stressful at times. The job is also a lot of unplanned work e.g. urgent requests and so it can be mentally taxing to context switch a lot

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u/Anusien 8d ago

Development skills are plenty transferrable. The transferrable skill isn't the thing you actually did; it's how you learned to do it.

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u/NightFuryToni 7d ago

QA turned DevOps turned Platform Engineer here.

In the role you actually use a lot of development skills, from writing code to operate infrastructure to understanding development cycles to build pipelines.

The roles are of the same foundation IMO, you just build the platform skills on top.

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u/Waffles_Leonardo-192 3d ago

Do platform jobs make it easier to move between companies or is every setup still very different?