[evoneutron]

I recently made a career transition from SWE to DevOps/SRE role. The big difference is tooling - IaC tools like terraform/ansible/chef is a must because automation is key. Those are also like scripting languages (declarative/procedural) instead of OO.

Generally requires a different thinking too - when you develop code on localhost you can ignore all the networking constraints, monitoring, logging etc.

In a production system those components are critical, so the focus becomes more on understanding how the full system functions, rather than just the business logic of the code.

A lot depends on experience but I think in general it's better to move from Dev -> DevOps than from Ops -> DevOps. Especially now that IaC is the primary tool that you would use.