While you will be expected to work off-hours. So much of the job is about keeping things humming along nicely, and when that's happening, nobody has much expectation from you.
You can slowly automate the time-consuming segments of your job. And most of the time, the automation isn't necessarily difficult to do, as most platforms have API endpoints designed for programmatic interaction.
On the developer-side, you could find a job maintaining a product for a smaller company. It will mostly be DevOps work, but with some bug fixes or minor enhancements thrown in. This would be a much more visible job than DevOps. And if you don't really care about the product, it might not be a good fit.
I have a former colleague who has been working devops/web site maintenance for a Sewage Pipe Manufacture* for going on 13 years now. Last I talked to him, he loved it. $80k is plenty to live on, he has no commute and got to watch his kids grow up.
* Not really, but it's an equally obscure, but very specific industry.
"devops" is really hit or miss. I used to do devops consulting and all I saw were people who had no idea what they were doing and so they constantly had fires to put out. There is no time to fix and automate when you are putting out fires all day.
Yeah, the "small company" aspect is pretty key here. Their requirements tend to be much more modest as they can't really afford to be moving fast and breaking things. So once you have a solid environment stood up, it is unlikely to change meaningfully for a while.
Think a job that requires maintaining a LAMP built in the mid 00s. Once you write scripts to install the product on a VM, get database backups automated, and set up alerting, you're basically done. Every once in a while, you do some security updates on VMs, maybe perform the migration from Ubuntu x.04LTS to x.04LTS once every few years.
While you will be expected to work off-hours. So much of the job is about keeping things humming along nicely, and when that's happening, nobody has much expectation from you.
You can slowly automate the time-consuming segments of your job. And most of the time, the automation isn't necessarily difficult to do, as most platforms have API endpoints designed for programmatic interaction.
On the developer-side, you could find a job maintaining a product for a smaller company. It will mostly be DevOps work, but with some bug fixes or minor enhancements thrown in. This would be a much more visible job than DevOps. And if you don't really care about the product, it might not be a good fit.
I have a former colleague who has been working devops/web site maintenance for a Sewage Pipe Manufacture* for going on 13 years now. Last I talked to him, he loved it. $80k is plenty to live on, he has no commute and got to watch his kids grow up.
* Not really, but it's an equally obscure, but very specific industry.