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Comment by nubb | Hacker News Reader

ill never get why people punish themselves with this devops shit. you could just learn 1 thing (networking) on a few vendors (cisco, juniper, whatever), pass a few tests and be making good money out the gate.

i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff.

am i crazy?

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> i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff.

Yup, that's me. I would call my self a generalist with a slight tendency towards cloud infrastructure. But I love ALL the tech!

* Let me install the newest WiFi hardware and rehaul the local network - I'm happy

* Let me dig into the newest cloud-native tools to enhance the developer experience- I'm happy

* Tell me about the small problem you have in a step of your build pipeline - I'll sink 10 days into it and optimize the whole pipeline - I'm happy

* Let me put all the infrastructure configuration into code - I'm happy

The list is endless. The / one downside is that I'm juggling priorities all the time and the backlog of things I would like to do is also - endless.

It depends on what you want, what you like, and what you're good at. If you just want some IT primitives that are common across many COTS products and then become a vendor tentacle, you can definitely do that and make plenty of money. But for plenty of people that's not enough and just makes them sad.

> just learn 1 thing (networking) on a few vendors (cisco, juniper, whatever)

Sure, if you're only motivation is money. To a lot of folks that sounds miserable.

> i feel like devops is just a bucket for lost souls who like tech stuff.

I don't understand...do you not like "tech stuff"? We're posting on hackernews here...

Networking is boring and difficult at the same time. Most of the tools are very outdated (i.e. cli - except probably palo alto and juniper gear) and troubleshooting is a nightmare. Modern infra is also not a piece of cake, with k8s everywhere nowadays, but it’s linux under the hood and most of the times troubleshooting is easy. Also, it is much more fun for me, but it’s about personal preferences. (Switched to systems/devops after ~15 years of networking and couldn’t be happier)

You are not crazy - you can definitly specialise. Though I think this is a good way to find out areas you may be interested in

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