Lately I've been made to understand that DevOps or Software Engineering is not for me, capability/maturity models, processes written in anything other then code, or metrics this and that just ism't me. We can argue about the meaning of words all day long but like I said this just isn't me. Some of us just prefer to say close to the metal (as in reality with all its complexity that escapes the precision of words and that is totally ok) and are deeply suspicious of any excessive abstractions. There must be others like me, so I am in search for my tribe, and I want to know what do we call ourself, maybe we don't want to call ourself anything, but where can we meet, who want to hire us, please tell me if you know, Thanks!
This will be an unpopular opinion because HN is full of web folks: Do not listen to jedberg, he drank the cloud kool-aid long ago and I can only assume he is not looking at billing and TCO critically or sitting in the board room discussing why the infra costs are higher than the staffing costs.
Personally, I do care that cloud is in the order of 10x the price and do have to explain infra cost as a metric of our road to profitability to our board.
My company does work closer to the metal, especially because for us the notion of “scaling” is not that we can simply slap a load balancer or a cache in front of a bunch of servers and call it a day: when you work with HFT or AAA Games: the performance you get on a single machine really matters, as does the ability of that machine to work reliably since there is state.
People in HFT and games really bleed for people like you and I, since its not as simple as CRUD stateless HTTP stuff where performance is measured in milliseconds and the average node runs 2GHz on all cores with 14 different abstractions.
Cloud optimises for the web, when its not the web, there are major dragons- those are your people.
I don't want to disappoint you, but what you want to do is not really supported by many companies anymore. Maybe the cloud providers would be interested in someone close to the metal. A few companies still run their own data centers, but even for them, hardware is so cheap it's usually easier to just throw more hardware at the problem than optimizing what you've got.
The one area where you might want to focus is HPC. All the companies building huge GPT models need highly optimized hardware.
Companies who need every engineer to "Do Everything™" are doing it wrong. A team may need to cover a lot of ground, but by putting together folks who have different skills. It's a management skill to assemble a team with diverse experience, rather than only hiring individuals who are "a team on their own".
I don't think you should feel excluded from "Software Engineering" just because you don't have a passion for managing containers. We need people who can write great code in the world, too!
