Early to mid career, the “full stack” developer has something going for them: odds are pretty high you have 7 years’ experience rather than “1 year [7] times”.
Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).
What you list sounds quite a bit like what devops was supposed to be but nobody does it that way. Instead you should probably look at small companies. In a large one the only way to wear that many hats is to stick your nose into other people’s responsibilities. At a small company there are gaps everywhere, and people are just glad when someone can fill them.
If you have any ability to mentor, you might want to look at lead positions as well, or think about what you need to get there. That gets you some management responsibilities but you still get to make things.
Not OP, but DevOps was supposed to be one pool of people taking care of everything, from infrastructure to networking to coding the whole thing. No handovers (or as few as possible), people who specialize, yes, but can take on a whole range of issues.
If Mark the networking guy is on vacation, Jane the fullstack dev should be able to perform basic networking troubleshooting and implement some fix until Mark returns and possibly fixes it.
Turns out people who can do that are:
- incredibly expensive
- very difficult to find
That's my take. I imagine a kanban board where prioritized issues are taken not by people who specialize in that particular area, but by whoever has the time right now. Again, I've actually never seen that implemented, except maybe for companies that consist of nobody but Jane and Mark :)).
In other places, it just means operations people with some basic coding chops. And they’re still a completely separate group, instead of an integrated team solving systems problems.
Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).
What you list sounds quite a bit like what devops was supposed to be but nobody does it that way. Instead you should probably look at small companies. In a large one the only way to wear that many hats is to stick your nose into other people’s responsibilities. At a small company there are gaps everywhere, and people are just glad when someone can fill them.
If you have any ability to mentor, you might want to look at lead positions as well, or think about what you need to get there. That gets you some management responsibilities but you still get to make things.