Navigating Career Growth in the Tech Industry: Finding the Right Balance Between Cloud Infrastructure and Coding Skills
I work as a cloud infrastructure engineer for a tier II enterprise company. My role involves working with a range of cloud-related tools, including Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, and GCP. While I am not required to have much coding or development experience for my job, I do get the opportunity to lead projects independently, which helps me to develop my soft skills.
However, I often worry that my coding skills are not as strong as my cloud skills. In the tech industry, coding proficiency is typically a requirement during interviews, and I fear that my limited coding experience may put me at a disadvantage. As a result, I am unsure about how to proceed with my career development. I wonder if I am missing out on an essential skill that most tech companies are looking for.
I am currently at a crossroads where I need to decide whether to focus on expanding my cloud knowledge by pursuing certifications or to invest more time in development activities that incorporate cloud technology. While I enjoy my job, I am concerned that I may be limiting my skills to those that are only relevant to my current company. I want to ensure that I am building a skillset that is broadly sought after by engineering professionals in the industry.
Discussion
(1 comment)- 2a year agoSenior Software Engineer [L5] at Google
Re: certifications, see this taro discussion. In short, they aren't worth very much if you already have a lot of experience with the technology, which you seem to have already.
I also don't think coding for the sake of interviews is important. LeetCoding is NOT real coding, though real coding skills do translate somewhat to it. If you needed to look for a new job, you can probably get good at leet code fairly quickly that it's a non-issue for interviewing.
Instead, I would look at this question as what you imagine a day in your future dream job will be like. Will you be spending most of your time creating and managing cloud services, or will be it creating new constructs and models out of code?
For me, I enjoy writing code and I am not a fan of managing and configuring cloud services, so the choice is clear for me :) If you want to code more, checkout the side project discussion!
