My job is 50% dev 50% devops/sre i would say.

One thing I noticed about whole SRE/devops scene lately is that there seems to be no grasp of the KISS principle, there are people building elaborate glass houses on top of k8s (tho k8s+pipelines is very useful its easy to get carried away)

another observation is that the people who are not good programmers but are good at appearing to get stuff done (but who create tons of tech debt) seem to fall naturally into SRE roles, as there is no testing culture in pipeline driven development

SRE currently is like the wild west, it be many years before it starts to resemble engineering

This. I run opsZero and the amount of CI/CD implementations I see in different infrastructures is crazy. Most code is not tested or overtly complex and every DevOps person seems to reinvent the wheel a hundred different ways.

Living in the world of Terraform, Kubernetes, and helm has been a godsend because it codifies deployments into a few buckets that removes a lot of this custom code. To be honest I’m thinking the days of DevOps may be numbered.

Depends on what kind of career you want to have, but I think for the most part, it could be good experience, depending on the position. Everyone's riding the big SV company bandwagon, so every company is going to be totally different. If you're being brought in to convert applications to run on AWS instead of on premise, or refactoring apps to run in containers instead of VM, you're not an SRE, you're operations, and that's what we call 'lift and shift.' The AWS and container experience will be valuable, but you're probably not going to learn much about software development. You're going to be writing Puppet or Chef modules (or if the company has their act together, ansible), and it's going to mostly suck.

As with anything, you're going to put out what you put in. If you want to be a low-level C programmer, then spend time doing whatever is related to that.

You will have no problem in moving back if you are good at finding and solving business “problems”.

As long as there is people working (not monitoring) there is job to do. Always read up on the company agreements with contractors and look for the money flow. This will fast get you into the most lucrative Dev role within every company.

Can you elaborate on this? Does it mean to position yourself as a person who can solve the problems that your business is throwing lots of money at? Or to avoid the problems that are being tossed to contractors since the business might not see them as long-enough term issues to hire employees to solve them?

I did the opposite and went into a dev role right after university then later moved onto devops jobs. Getting into DevOps is relatively easy but it does require a change of mind set (some of my current colleagues came from a dev background and still refuse to fully embrace devops ways).

I think if it's a startup, it'll be easy to get into either types of roles. From my experience start ups give you massive jumps in career progression in little time even if the company barely cares about career progression. For me this has been due to the tiny size of the teams vs giant teams (my current team is 50 man, in start ups my teams have been no more than 5 people).

Having said all of that, in bigger companies there's more opportunity to pick and choose where you specifically want to focus.

Mileage will likely vary.

Don’t be, doing SRE internships will give you the most comprehensive introduction to all aspects of developing and operating software. For me when reviewing candidates that would be a huge plus.

This is my own experience, but at my current company we’ve had quite a few people move from SRE to development. That being said, we are a pretty collaborative company, so the SREs are already working pretty closely with our dev team and aren’t totally siloed off in terms of communication and projects.

I remember Google trying to swindle me into an SRE internship when I applied for SWE. I politely declined because I wasn't spending $60000 on a degree to do ops work.