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Comment by techsupporter

> This is not counting the weeks where I was “on call” and forced to drop all of this to work on a backlog of DevOps related issues.

I want to say sorry at the beginning if I misread what the author (you?) intended when you wrote this. And I'm coming at this from someone who is not a developer and who, compared to the lofty Software Engineer salaries in this industry, feels underpaid and underappreciated for doing the operations/administration work.

With that said: I truly wish those who are leaving their roles where this kind of requirement exists--feels "forced"--would speak more loudly about the need to have actual people doing system administration work. This is especially true, I feel, in large companies who operate "the Cloud" and who ought to know better; someone needs to be doing that work and it can't always, or usually, be the people who are writing the features and implementing the updates to the core product you are selling.

But what seems like has happened is everyone in the tech industry has forgotten it, or named it "Site Reliability Engineer" with a job of 55% failure analysis, 35% coding, and 10% "are the infrastructure and products actually online and functional." And then this role gets looked down on and paid less because the people in the role--people like me--are not seen as "delivering" "value".

Which culminates in the proper software developers seeing it as a thing they are forced to do, resulting in disdain, and furthering the cycle.

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