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Yes, that's the millwright job (if you can't handle the math to reason about them you don't get the ticket to practice it). The style of programming "language" they tend to use is also one not many conventional developers even know exists.
By contrast, Devops is generally a simple position- generally alternating between "fix the hardware and the racks", complaining that the software running on said racks isn't their department, and claiming that they don't have time to grant access to the resources development needs to do its job any time this year because reasons. (Apologies to you if that's your trade; I'm sure you're one of the good ones.)
Most software engineering for that matter is also relatively simple labor- the thing that makes it engineering is that you have to do the design work too, and make sure every component interoperates (and is even fit for the task in the first place), and if it doesn't work (or stops working) they're ultimately in charge of modifying it so it does, and the list goes on. Sure, it can be a bit trickier because everything's virtual, but the upside is that all the error messages are generally in plain-ish English rather than "it makes a weird grinding sound but only below 2/3rds power".
It's depth that's not necessarily obvious unless you've actually seen it, but you do actually need a decent amount of brains and general systems knowledge to do either job well. It's like saying "yeah, anyone could do software development because 99% of it is just implementing CRUD over and over again"; it's technically true but an over-simplification.
I'll accept much of devops like that, but twitter really does have 100Ms of users, global scale, and a realtime timeline, search, ads, replies, etc system, that have to be understood, monitored, designed to operate fail in recoverable ways despite very complex interactions of all the systems even when being actively changed. Many of the SREs elon fired weren't just rack swappers, they were coders who designed systems to preemptively avoid complex failure cases. According to him, his job started as you say, but that changed -
And then
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The actual error is sadly only rarely actually pointed out by the error message. Compiler errors are straightforward, runtime errors are not, and runtime errors in complex interconnected systems may as well be Kafka's Prozess.
And the largest category of errors doesn't even have messages.
Fully agreed on DevOps though.
True, that's why it's plainish English.
Hell, even the compiler errors aren't straightforward the less structured the language gets; it's even better when said compiler does shit like "you meant for that object to not have its keys named the same thing, right? I'll just do it automatically because... fuck you, I guess".
It's a mess I'm not convinced even AI tools will be able to solve, so maybe I should just be thankful for the job security.
In what language do compilers do that? The horror!
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