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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.

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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.

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