Career paths for devops engineers and SREs
It may be difficult to focus on your career when you spend your work days meeting very challenging deployment timelines or resolving the latest priority incidents. But focusing too much on today’s challenges or using job-hopping as a proxy for career planning may lead you down a path you’re less enthusiastic about over time.
Although everyone should have some midrange and longer-term career goals, my experience is that people working in IT struggle to define them. “Are you on a technical or leadership track?” HR asked me when I was younger, and they followed this up with courses to develop technical skills. Once HR identified me as a “high potential,” they made generic leadership programs available that were not specific to technology, data, or transformation responsibilities.