And they likely won’t be as good as dedicated SRE teams.
But few businesses care about that right now considering layoffs.
Throwing developers at a problem even if it isn’t in their skill set is an industry trend that won’t go away and be more pronounced during downturns.
Full stack developers are a great example of rolling two roles together without twice the pay.
Full stack means you write code running on back end and front end. 99% of the time the code you write on the FE interfaces with your other code for the BE. It’s pretty coherent and feedback loops are similar.
Devops/SRE on the other hand is very different and I agree we shouldn’t expect software developers be mixing in SRE in their day to day. The skills, tools, mindset, feedback loop, and stress levels are too different.
If you’re not doing simple monoliths then you need a dedicated devops/SRE team.
- you spend more time to keep up with both of those sectors compared to dedicated front or back end positions
- you context switch more often than dedicated positions
- you spent more time getting good at both of those things
- you removed some amount of communication overhead if there were two positions
You are definitely not being compensated for that extra work and benefit to the business given that full stack salaries are close to front end and back end position salaries.
Have I done it a lot before the SPA era? yes.
Would I be able to do a half decent job today? Probably.
Would that eat into what brainpower I currently muster to fulfill my backend role? I'm convinced of it.
Can I continue to earn a living in the current market? I'm afraid not for long...