An interesting note in there about Meta not having a freeze on Production Engineers. I think that engineers who are worried about economic instability should consider moving closer to production/delivery/sustainment/SRE; it's not always as fun as building new features, but it is definitely a valued area of expertise.

What are the reasons behind the boom on DevOps/Cloud Engineers/Admins 2.0?

From my perspective, its a continuing boom over decades.

New abstractions come along (eg. AWS), bringing additional complexity, then better tooling gets developed to deal with it, and this prepares the way for new abstractions on top (eg. Kubernetes).

At the same time, legacy systems remain around a long time and need experienced people to maintain those.

While operators are glad they don't have to deal with bare metal any more, there's a lot of additional complexity you need to understand to manage AWS effectively, that didn't exist for most companies back in bare metal hosting days.

The complexity doesn’t seem to have really moved that much, just the output has absolutely exploded to the point where the average dev ops person is expected to do things that only tech megacorps would have pulled off 15 years ago.

It’s no longer acceptable for anyone to turn their service off for maintenance for example. They all have to roll updates out frequently and without downtime. They all have to scale to huge numbers of users and data. They all have to have almost perfect uptimes.

There's online game, which runs since 97 and has profits around 20 milions of EUR

and they turn off their game everyday for 10mins :P

... what game? Runescape?

Tibia

tibia?

yup

I've been doing since graduating and I'm middle age now. Its not a new phenomenon.

In 07 I was very young and worried about the economy; when expressing my concerns to an older coworker said "dont ever worry, we've always been and always will be in demand". He was right. I jumped ship 3 times during the last recession, all with big bumps in pay. I've never worried about finding work, so much so that if pressed I know I can secure 2-3 offers after a week of looking

But to answer your direct question I think its three fold:

* No one wants a junior in production so unless you're well established and can burden the cost of one good luck getting in

* The educational path is very informal and unless you're going for this type of work specifically you're not learning what you need to be

* Most SWE's dont make good devops (sorry thats a fact no offense meant to anyone)

I think there are two kinds of Production Engineers:

- DevOps only, as in Terraform or CloudFormation or CDK but not much else

- DevOps/SRE/DX, where you have engineers who handle DevOps as part of a mix of Platform Engineering, where your Platform team is able to guide and assist Product /Experience and Data teams on every part of the Developer Experience, from infra to on-call

I think it's the Platform Engineering model that has the most value; I don't know that DevOps without the rest of the package is as valuable

It coincides with the rise of web-based centralized services. If you're creating Windows, the classic Office suite, classic Photoshop, MATLAB, whatever software was popular 25 years ago that users installed and ran themselves, your part of the software lifecycle effectively ends when you ship, minus some minimal level of customer support and maybe training. Feature development, bug fixes, and hopefully testing is the vast bulk of what you do as a software company.

Fast forward to today where everything is running on servers and you're now responsible for installing, updating, monitoring, and scaling yourself, and probably also want some level of automation in the test and release processes. The other half of the software lifecycle is now core to your own business. The engineering challenges posed and the skillsets to handle them overlap with product development, but are not identical. So specialized roles have evolved to fill the gap.

As for the apparent demand, this is the part of the software lifecycle that CS and SE degree programs largely gloss over or don't teach at all, and there are no bootcamps for it. It's also very difficult to self-teach for the same reason there aren't a whole lot of self-taught high-energy physicists. It's easier to build out a homelab than a particle collider, but largely you need equipment beyond a personal laptop. This means most of the people doing this kind of work learned on the job at some point, and that means they're more senior and rarer.

I'm curious on people's thoughts on the demand for them as well.

From my perspective in doing infra / devops stuff, they exist to make developers lives easier and faster (CI testing and continuous deployment), or in the case of monitoring / platform engineering, looking to "enhance" their capabilities. Meanwhile the people who do both feature development and the bugfixes are product developers ... So in my eyes it seems like the "auxiliary pieces" like devops people wouldn't be seen as core or necessary to the business in the eyes of managers looking to lay people off

Older companies with poor engineering practices don't have devops people at all, often times they don't even unit test actually, maybe it would be a riskier position to be in charge of those pipelines

Perhaps the data point of Meta still hiring SREs is just one data point as well (they could just be in more need of SRE people), although it is so hard to find more market wide data

Roles that require a vast array of expertise but do not necessarily paying top $$$$ for that expertise.

--Dinosaur Unix SA

Kubernetes

Any recommended reading for those?

https://sre.google/ is a great resource

Steve Jobs used to talk about "innovating their way out of the downturn". Maybe they feel their positions are comfortable, safe, and innovation investment isn't required?

GitHub and Azure are both Microsoft.

Is Microsoft freezing hiring, or is it just those two products?

They are and they aren't. They are both operated almost independently from the mothership. That being said, Microsoft has already pulled back hiring significantly.

I work at Microsoft and I can confirm this.

1) companies saying there is a huge shortage of candidates 2) companies announcing hiring freeze

I sense this has nothing to do with economics and it is probably just an attempt to stagnate wages, scare the peasants not to demand inflation pay raise.

My compan (5bn revenue) did basically the same. Closed a huge hcol office and a few months later started to hire again like crazy in another hcol.

Yeah, Azure freezing hiring is kind of weird since it has been extremely profitable and is such a gigantic org. Cloud also seems like it should have very consistent cash flows.

Interesting. Will this create a window for startups and SMBs? I've being getting more offers for SMBs and small startups than before.

Weird. Well running companies should use antycyclic to gain further advantage to normal companies.

The problem is that right now everyone is still looking to switch jobs.

If you assume that recessions bring out some really talented engineers looking for jobs, that's not happening yet. A good company strategy would be to stop or slow down hiring, wait for the recession to start in full swing, then restart hiring when the good talent is on the market. At the same time, you could use it to re-evaluate projects. If you've ever worked at a big company, I'm sure you can think of a few projects that should be killed because they are a waste of resources. This gives a big company a chance to remove some poor performing employees. Unfortunately, this will also get rid of good employees too, because of politics and bad managers.

This can be bad for the employees because you aren't sure if your project is going to be cancelled. You are less likely to look at new jobs, so if your current job is really bad you are stuck. This also puts downward pressure on salaries.

I don't know if this is the ethical thing to do, but I think it makes business sense.

do you mean invest when things are bad so when it goes back up you are in a strong position to 'ride the wave'?

Yepp

They're trying to force a cooldown of the labor market, let see who holds out longer