I never comment on Hacker News posts but I found this blog post to be so insightful that I had to give my two cents. VenderOps really is a different job and as a "senior" dev in my career I can say that it is a job that I would happily take at this point. I work for a small startup and there is no end to the AWS, Docker and K8s shenanigans we are called on to do day in and day out. The problem is no one wants to volunteer to do this kind of work so the CTO (the most experienced engineer on our team) ends up doing most of it himself. There are paid consultants who will gladly come in and Terraform all your shit but we don't hire them. While some of us may not consider that "real engineering" these professionals are essential to the success of your startup. Once they put the pieces in place then your devs can run with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline and deliver the features your customers want. Then as adoption starts to take off you get into observability, Prometheus, Grafana and the five nines. This is the point when the agile rock stars start to burn out or bail and the need to bring in experienced SREs becomes inescapable. This is the VenderOps state and it is the pit of success you want your startup to be in even if you yourself have no interest in partaking in it. There will always be a place for brilliant people who need to work and the hardest problems but let's face it a lot of us are not that. I know I am not. A lot of us are journeymen and women who just want put their kids through college and hopefully retire comfortably.