A a friend of mine said he could recommend me to a junior DevOps role at the company he works in, but I’m interested mostly in back-end development and DevOps is not really something I like. The question is: could I use experience as a DevOps to later switch to back-end? Edit: more detail

  • zlatko@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Absolutely, especially si if you don’t have a background in software development. Operations tasks a typical “DevOps engineer” does can help you understand the big picture, the concept of a server or service or a batch job. Configurations , environment, initialization, logging, integrations. It will introduce you to a lot of failure points - network problems, load problems, balancing problems etc.even some domain language - what’s this or that service for, what is it doing, for whom. The usual way to come to backend is e.g. from school with very little of such experiences. You would come with all these ideas already as known problems. You would also learn a lot of the dev process, team work, documenting how to run something. You’ll pick up basics of programming through bash and python and similar scripts. Even read some “proper” code once in a while.

    After a while when you get settled, you’ll learn a programming language on the side. But you’ll only learn the syntax, standard library, idiomatic ways to loop or something. The problems to solve - which IMHO is often a weak point of many trainings and tutorials - will be a known thing to you, not abstract made up ideas.

    So yes, you can use the DevOps role experience in your future work as a backend developer.