Should I switch from Dev to DevOps/SRE for a big salary jump?
Hey everyone,
I’m currently working as a developer with 2 years of experience, making around ₹11.5 LPA (base) in Bangalore. I’ve got an opportunity to move into a DevOps/SRE role that offers ₹35–40 LPA base, which is a huge jump for me.
The role seems to involve: • Handling production incidents and leading bridges/war rooms • Automating tasks and environment checks (scripting, CI/CD, monitoring) • Working closely with infra/dev teams on reliability and observability • Ensuring availability and stability of services
I do enjoy automation and problem-solving, but I’ve mostly been on the dev side so far, but have also handled prod incidents.
For folks who’ve made this kind of switch (or are already in DevOps/SRE): • Would you recommend moving to DevOps/SRE at this stage of my career? • How’s the long-term growth and pay compared to staying in development? • Any big challenges I should be aware of before jumping in? • If you were in my shoes, would you take it?
Really curious to hear some real-world perspectives. Thanks!
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I've been doing SRE for almost nine years, and honestly, this gig isn't a long-term thing. on-call is a nightmare, messes up your sleep, and wrecks your mental health. If you've got dev experience, you might like SRE, but if I were you and doing well, I wouldn't switch just for the money, you've only got two years under your belt, so don't go chasing the money now. Devs make way more than SREs in the long run.
I’m a bit bearish on dev jobs, we use AI tools and I don’t think I’ve written any code manually from a past few months. So coding as a skill for me is depreciating, I don’t even see the point in skilling up, when I’m gonna end up using Claude code.
See coding is never important design & architecture is important I can say a ml research scientist earn more than 70 lpa with 2 years of experience with less coding
Woow... This is great.. I am into devops with no development background and am struggling to cross 30 lpa package with 10 yrs if total IT experience
so how are you working towards this to solve it?
I doubt that which company will give 35 lpa for SRE engineer for just 2 years and that to in development side
I think this post is just to catch some attraction
To answer your questions -
- Yes
- Pretty good, but thats true for any role anywhere as long as you are top 1%. But if you are average, the pay would always be more in Backend & ML. Ofcourse, having a dev background, you can always move in your career as a software engineer in Infrastructure teams/Platforms, so, you do get to keep higher pay while being in such DevOps/SRE/Platforms team
- Things would be different. Get ready to be challenged. There's a lot of learning opportunities for you depending on the team and the maturity of the org on Infrastructure
- Depends on you, if you are interested in this field, which is away from real customers, away from limelight, then sure, its good. But I have seen devs in this field actually shifting to teams where their change actually is shipped to customers
Hope this helps!
Take it if you are interested. My friend works as sre. With 10 years of experience he is getting 1 cr. But when looking for a change Or if you want to continue on technical side down the line development is always good. With devops since openings are less a little, takes a bit more time to switch.
Take the offer work for some time. In case you really don't like the job you can always switch back to dev. And since this is a good jump the next role when you jump back to dev you'll probably get a higher package
Sounds like a bs idea buddy
try diving into the stack actually being used and if you like that or atleast it doesn’t frustrate you, do the switch
