I’m based in the UK and on an apprenticeship programme at work. After completing a general IT technician course at level 3 I’m moving onto a level 4 course. It looks like my choices are going to be devops or network engineering. I know a little about networks but I know nothing about devops. My question is, which is likely to give me more career opportunities?
Devops will have more job openings, network will have a higher salary, especially as you become more senior.
Devops people who don’t know networking and/or general traditional sysadmin work are a crushing pain in the ass for those of us who have to support them though. Networking background will make you better at devops, but not necessarily vice versa.
Becoming a networking expert will also make you an expert in troubleshooting everything else in the IT stack from web servers not turned on to database queries causing high CPU usage. All because when something goes wrong it’s the network fault.
I’m far from a networking expert, but I was usually the guy that had to reel the network guys back in when they said “you always blame the network” and stood around waiting to be proven in the wrong. It’s amazing what a couple tracert and continuous ping commands will show (and how little interest corporate IT shows in doing even the basics unless monitoring is under their team).
Sysadmin and network roles are saturated. You only need a couple for a few hundred employees and colleges are pumping out dozens a semester each.
So unless you’re interested in certification hell and rock a stellar GPA. I’d suggest DevOps of the two choices.
Database and legacy code roles are in demand though.
Here (central EU) I see a lot of sysadmin job offers. They tend to be less well paid than developers, so unless you can become some senior “expert”, expect a pay cut. But people will always need someone to fix “the computer”.
US Sr SRE (devops) checking in: I would personally recommend the networking path. Caveat: A good engineer will know the background of both (curl, telnet, Iam, security groups, cidrs, domains)
Devops was mostly automating the stuff in between the other teams; and most of that is working out of the box these days. Most repos already have their Jenkins and docker files. How much admin are you expecting on serverless? Most people are pivoting to app support (ticket queues) or supporting managed services (on call).
As far as my day to day:
- Troubleshooting incidents and walk ups
- Answering pages (read restarting things)
- Groovy Jenkins build pipelines
- Cdk applications
- Ruby configuration management
- Parameter/secret management
- Reading error messages for devs
- Yaml/xml linting
- Assisting in load testing
- Changing settings to make the application more stable. Ex: db connections, memory
- Cloud UI/clis
Pros: I do a lot of different things, we get downtime because we need to respond to things immediately, I don’t have normal project/sprint planning. I have the keys to the kingdom. Higher pay than most other devs. I hack things together, I don’t need to design workflows.
Cons: I am on call, I am the silliest clown (I get hardest problems), I need to understand a lot of moving pieces, sometimes when things break, there is a lot of pressure on you to find something hard. I regular have to Google “bash variable syntax” because I’m coding in 15 languages. Interviewing for jobs is impossible because no 2 positions are the same
