Being "just a developer" in this DevOps era

[chicane]

I'm in the relatively fortunate position of having managed to secure well paid contract work for most of the previous 11 years as a backend PHP developer.

However, I'm noticing a trend in recent months that many of the contracts (especially those that pay a decent rate) are looking for more of a DevOps skillset - i.e. in-depth knowledge of areas such as AWS, Docker and so on as well as multiple programming languages. I have limited experience in these areas, and in all honesty, would prefer not to sacrifice more of my precious spare time keeping up with another set of technical skills.

With this in mind, what is the panel's opinion on the the sustainability of the current DevOps trend? Is it here to stay, or will it become a passing phase as clients understand that it's difficult for even the top tier of candidates to constantly retain in-depth knowledge of such a broad range of skills?

[pauldee]

I'd say you only need 1 devops to many developers, so the demand for pure developers will still be around for a while to come.

[cojak]

Unless you're expected to support your software as well, obv.

Don't forget to add call-out rates to your contract.

[northernladuk]

Dev-Ops. Isn't that another word for Supervision, Direction and Control?

[Icike]

and in all honesty, would prefer not to sacrifice more of my precious spare time keeping up with another set of technical skills.

that's certainly the challenge, I hear you, but automation and AWS itself are getting more and more marketshare so I don't think you have a choice.
Chef, Jenkins, AWS, Puppet, etc are the way forward for decent dayrate or permie salary.

[Spikeh]

Dev-Ops. Isn't that another word for Supervision, Direction and Control?

Spent a year at a well known airline providing DevOps services - I was advising and implementing based off my own recommendations and research; client gave me some general guidelines (such as "we need X on site, and Y in the cloud") and I did the rest remotely. Pretty legit outside IR35 imo.

[garethevans1986]

This is what Im currently doing - my background is a developer but I've always worked with Infrastructure too, I'm now working with Powershell DSC, Puppet, Ansible (starting), Terraform, AWS/Azure, VMWare, Git, Vagrant, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy and ProGet.

G

[Platypus]

Even I'm swotting up on DevOps, AWS and more .... if you knew me you'd fall off your chair at this news

[Hobosapien]

From a Microsoft Azure perspective and the continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) method via Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), I see it as the natural progression of the developer doing the full release cycle.

So same as before when the operations team didn't know enough how to deploy new software releases and the developer ended up doing it anyway.

Only had brief exposure so far but if it means I can now put DevOps on my CV I'm not complaining.

[BlueSharp]

Contractors get paid the big bucks for knowing stuff other's don't when what you know saves or makes the client money. Being "just a developer" is fine if you don't want to charge the big bucks. Yes that does involve taking a gamble on emerging trends and putting the hours in to stay upto date.