This is honestly one of the best kept secrets in tech. If you actually want some work life balance and don't care too much about job titles and status, the best gigs period are those where you support the "front line" devs in some fashion. Nearly the same pay, but less stress and more self-direction. Tooling and QA folks rarely get called up at 3am on a Sunday morning because prod is down.
> Tooling and QA folks rarely get called up at 3am on a Sunday morning because prod is down.
My (devops) team did the tooling, but we've worked very closely with QA, and while they didn't get the pages, both teams felt that they shared the responsibility of making the final product (well basically a cool tech demo) rock solid for the viewers. In 4.5 years there I've touched ca 600 projects, but I agree with you - it was still easier than doing the frontend work. Arguably less glory but definitely more life.
