Ask HN: Do I risk getting “pigeonholed” by accepting an Operations Engi. role? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do I risk getting “pigeonholed” by accepting an Operations Engi. role?

1 point__onetimeacc__8 comments

Sorry if this is the wrong usage of "Ask HN", I'm not sure if this is the right usage or not.

Anyway, basically I'm a 4th year CS student who will graduate sometime next year (so basically I'll graduate around year 4.5).

edit: oh and this is a full-time internship, not a full role since I'll have to go back to school for 1 or 2 quarters after summer.

Anyway, I applied to a company; I heard about the company from their senior director of engineering - basically the guy came up to talk to us during a "poster session" at our school's "capstone" competition that my team won (basically 4th years form teams and try to create products).

Anyway, since I have experience on my resume in general scripting, writing simple integration scripts with sed/awk, computer security and the like (aside from traditional dev experience), I ended up getting interviewed for an operations engineer role.

The onsite went well and I should be receiving an offer soon, but basically my concern is, if I accept this role am I likely to get stuck in it? I like stuff like continuous integration, containerization etc but more from the development perspective (so I guess what you'd call devops, as much of a buzzword as that is).

I liked all the engineers I met with, and they made a point that operations works closely with development, but obviously don't write any production code, just the scripting/general automation coding around it.

I'm kind of rambling now but I think experience with AWS, kubernetes, network administration etc would help round out my skills, but I'm wondering if it's a better idea to focus on development and learn those skills as part of development rather than sort of separated from it.

Thanks for any advice

Oldster here: It's definitely possible that there will be an effect. I've done both "dev" and "ops" over the years--I have broad skills--and I've definitely noticed that I seem to be typecast to whichever I've done most recently. It's almost bizarre in a way, but if you're currently in an ops role, many people become unable to see your programming/math chops and vice versa. Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback. That's kind of what I figured; that employers will tend to anchor on your last role, so I'll try to make sure to get the message across that I want to do both development and ops in the future.

In your experience, do salaries cap out earlier say in Ops vs Dev? It seems like they could scale up equally high since whether you're producing value as a developer or, say, making a massive system x% more efficient, but obviously salary decisions can be constrained by HR's idea of what a role entails

I'm not sure. As a guess, it's probably a bit easier to get a higher salary as ops than dev. This doesn't have much to do with value, since corps usually cannot perceive your value. Rather, it's more that you're closer to where the rubber hits the road. And unlike a dev, often ops will be expected to pull nearly infinite hours if something awful happens.

My "career" started as the ops/IT guy for a radio station, and concurrently as a video game tester; a rather un-glorious start if you ask me. To say I've worn many hats since then is an understatement; and if you build good skills, I'm confident you can do the same.

As modbait points out, you definitely get catered to for your concentration, but I'd point out that I think that has more to do with how your portray yourself/your vitae. By having broader experiences, I think you gain an edge in being able to emphasize various parts of your history and tell a better story for why you fit for a given position in the future. I have a "sysadmin" resume, a "data analyst" resume, and a "full stack" resume, to name a few.

From the sound of it, what you'll be touching is far from unapplicable. <mainstream cloud platform>, scripting, basic sec/platform stuff, these are all foundational skills pretty regardless of what part of tech you want to do next, I have never once regretted coming from an ops perspective initially. (In fact I proudly think it's an advantage for both understanding your whole stack, and gaining some very useful mindsets for developing and maintaining robust and long-running software. You may also become a beast at firefighting, depending on your role, which _never_ is a bad skill to have.)

If you want to focus on dev, ops positions often hold opportunities to take some initiative/leverage those skills. There's a reason "Devops" is such a buzzword. Always be asking yourself how you can automate yourself out of a job.

Sorry, this has been quite a ramble; "ops as an important skillset" is a topic very close to heart for me. hope this braindump is even marginally useful, and best of luck of course. Bust ass, listen to what the sister comments said about networking+projects+staying hungry for growth. This washed up ops guy is rooting for you.

Thanks dude :)

My eventual goal is to be competent in basically every part of the stack, so I think this role will fit me.

Good work experience is good work experience. It will earn you more opportunities and money down the road. Just insure you mix development and ops if you want the flexibility to be able to do both down the line. If you only do software engineering then you may end up building really poor applications because you do not have the systems engineering experience to know how to scale and secure apps appropriately.

Since it is just an internship it will not be your first and last job. If you want to do one for some time that is fine, as when you apply for another role you will normally have to pass engineering tests for the job at hand which will let you know if it is right for you. The really good jobs ask you questions related to what you or your peers are actually doing.

1. Once you have a job at a company it's often possible to move sideways into another team at the company.

2. It's just an internship, you're not choosing your whole career.

1+2 suggest this may be fine opportunity to get regular programmer job at this company. Just make sure you spend time with people in other teams too, and if you like their roles better you can, at end of internship, go talk to them about getting job there after school.

Do the work/intern. Dev on the side. Put your projects up on Github. Make connections at internship. Keep ear to the ground for opportunities.

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