I knew a full-stack developer who had a fixed idea to become a devops. When I met him, he just transitioned from backend to frontend, and was doing quite well. However all he wanted is to do dev ops. Why, I asked, why? “Because devops developers are well-paid”, he said. But I could not fully believe it was the only reason. Because airplane pilots are paid even better, why devops then?
And now I understood why.
I worked closely with Backend developers. They are powerful. If they do not do their job well, frontend developers can’t implement new features or will have to bring business logic into frontend. Backend bugs are dangerous as they will make a frontend crash. Strong backend = 70% of the project’s success.
I worked with Front-end developers (not as close as with backend, but still). Frontend developers are important as well. If they do not do their job well, user experience will be bad, backend developers will need to work harder to handle as much things as possible in the core of the app. Strong frontend = 30% of the project’s success.
But if Devops engineers don’t do their job well, neither backend nor frontend developers can see the results of their efforts on production (or can not consistently see the results of their efforts). Only devops developer can make the whole team suffer (or the whole team enjoy). Coding is easy. Making your code to appear on production easily turns out to be hard.
I am sure it will change, it can’t stay like this.