Career as cloud engineer

[blueocean]

Hi. I'm new grad and currently considering starting a career as Cloud engineer.
one of my concerns is the working hours.

How is the work/life balance?
Do you have to work over the weekends?

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

I think most IT companies expect their employee to commit a certain degree of OT or weekend scheduled jobs regards of their role and domains. Afterall most production IT systems avoids doing their maintenance works during peak hours or daytime... So there will surely be times where you will need to work beyond the regular hours. This is the norms, i guess.

My advice for grads is to look past the work life balance aspect first when they are still young. Once you are in your 30s, when you have life commitments like marriage and kids... then i believe it will be a better time to reevaluate your work hours. Focus on building your IT knowldge and build a certain level of competencies first and foremost.

Not trying to discourage, foul or anything, hope you set your expectations right.

Advice is to get a software development role as a junior. You will learn more general software engineering skillset that keeps your options open in the future.

If you are a cloud engineer at AWS/GCP/Azure, you are basically a customer engineer. You won't do much hands-on work. Instead, you will likely sit in client meetings talking about what solutions the cloud providers have. The learning rate would not be as fast as if you were to be doing the software building yourself. I personally interviewed a few of these engineers looking to transition to software development, and frankly, even having Google on their resume doesn't help.

If you are a 'cloud' engineer in a old-school MNC, then it's basically an infrastructure engineering job. Its not really.meaningful as you will likely be on support, answering tickets, doing backups, etc.

Newer, more cutting-edge companies likely won't call the role cloud engineer, but DevOps or platform engineer, so I doubt you are referring to a role with these companies. If it is, then actually, by all means, take it.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I think most IT companies expect their employee to commit a certain degree of OT or weekend scheduled jobs regards of their role and domains. Afterall most production IT systems avoids doing their maintenance works during peak hours or daytime... So there will surely be times where you will need to work beyond the regular hours. This is the norms, i guess.

My advice for grads is to look past the work life balance aspect first when they are still young. Once you are in your 30s, when you have life commitments like marriage and kids... then i believe it will be a better time to reevaluate your work hours. Focus on building your IT knowldge and build a certain level of competencies first and foremost.

Not trying to discourage, foul or anything, hope you set your expectations right.

simi lj is this ******** advice?

IT companies are literally the only ones who will give u the best WLB with a ton of WFH opportunities, tell me another industry that gives u this, there's none

biggest problem with SG in general is when morons who dont know anything try and give some lj advice and immediately assume that everyone wants kids and get married when gen-z and millennials marriage statistics have dipped severely compared to boomers.

dumb fk

WLB depends on the company.

I would say that becoming a DevOps might be a better option. In some companies, DevOps people earn even more money than developers. Why? Because their role is extremely hand-on, their work often has a direct impact on the production systems, and they need to have knowledge from different areas (writing code, CI/CD, operation systems, infrastructure, cloud, networking, etc).

You can start by studying for an entry-level cloud exam and see which area interests you most.

Depends on your company. But generally speaking, you're unlikely to have to work weekends (except in exceptional cases). OT/weekend work might happen especially if you're working very heavy on on-prem "private cloud" systems, in which case you're pretty much an infra engineer.