That's fine if that's what you want. But I'd suggest that your career might be improved by being more willing to take on harder challenges and grow as an engineer. Product features and fixing bugs are intricately linked to infrastructure, and limiting yourself to only code is going to limit your ability to debug hard problems.
Early in my career, I worked for a business that still used mainframes, and we had this random bug that caused processes not to communicate and drop messages. Because I was willing to dig into the intricacies of server administration, I was able to diagnose the problem as the IPC queues size being set to the kernal default, and the default only allowed for a few seconds of messages to back up. It was a quick fix, deploy a new kernal parameter to allow for bigger IPC buffers, but if I'd refused to do "devops" work, we'd never have found the problem.
As my old boss said, you're not paid to do only the easy stuff. You're paid to do the hard stuff too.
> But I'd suggest that your career might be improved by being more willing to take on harder challenges and grow as an engineer.
Indeed. That's what I have done (I do infra stuff + product features). I don't like it, but I do it.
> As my old boss said, you're not paid to do only the easy stuff. You're paid to do the hard stuff too.
This intrinsically states "product features == easy", "infra struff == hard". While I think that certain topics related to infrastructure are hard, certain topics related to product feature are hard as well.
What I think your boss wanted to say is "I don't want to pay an extra paycheck to an infra engineer. So, I'll pay you 20% more so you do the infra stuff instead. And you get to 'grow as an engineer'. It's a win-win!".
Early in my career, I worked for a business that still used mainframes, and we had this random bug that caused processes not to communicate and drop messages. Because I was willing to dig into the intricacies of server administration, I was able to diagnose the problem as the IPC queues size being set to the kernal default, and the default only allowed for a few seconds of messages to back up. It was a quick fix, deploy a new kernal parameter to allow for bigger IPC buffers, but if I'd refused to do "devops" work, we'd never have found the problem.
As my old boss said, you're not paid to do only the easy stuff. You're paid to do the hard stuff too.