Caution for Ambitious Software Engineers
Pros
- Driven and smart people, mostly. Also, a lot of "street smarts" who understand the grind - Moving to modern tech stack and cloud - A lot of the annoying stuff is managed so its quite nice in helping developers focus on core competencies. For example, CICD, Kafka, Kubernetes. You just have to deal with that on configuration - "Good name" on resume. Not as great in tech(as FAANG) but still quite decent and will open doors to interviews in top-tier tech companies.
Cons
- If you are a software engineer who wants to grow and be aligned with the business goals, avoid the back office (Operations). You'll spend your career debbuging legacy applications, writing unit tests and working on projects that serve very few and are used seasonally. I happened to debug a program where the node version was no longer in use by the firm. I couldn't even get it to compile locally. The only hope was to keep the node server running with the bug or rewrite the whole program. There are some exceptions, but in general this is what I observed. You'll find a lot of interns trying to move towards the mid/front office full time. - Based on my experience there, it seems there is less of a budget(and as a result bonuses and promotions) allocated to the back office. Therefore, there is less drive to innovate/build cooler products. The main priority seems to be serving the needs of the front office and just getting by on MVPs, thereby racking up technical debt to the ceiling. - Where there is less value, there is a lot of room for politics and pettiness. This is very evident in the back office. There is a lot more room for bullying and bias. Its quite annoying, frankly, and a lot of people end up leaving after 2 years. There is quite an age gap in some of these divisions and associates are few.
