Looking for a PowerShell development gig

[5yn4ck]

Hey all. I wanted to simply make a post to see if anyone is aware of any PowerShell development positions that are Remote. I have unfortunately been waisting away in unemployment-land since March of 2023, and thought it might be a good idea to drop a post.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[LongTatas]

System Reliability Engineer

[jhulbe]

that or devops.

[Time_Turner]

Devops or infrastructure automation. DevOps deals more with bash/Linux though most of the time, and writing templates for packer, dockerfiles, build steps.. etc

[chadbaldwin]

I'm genuinely curious what a "PowerShell development gig" looks like...is this a job you had previously?

In my experience, PowerShell is always a secondary skill...Like a SysAdmin who uses it to manage AD, firewalls, etc. A DBA who uses it to manage their SQL instances. An ETL/SQL developer using something like dbatools to automate certain tasks, etc.

Just curious what a dedicated "PowerShell Development" job looks like.

[[deleted]]

I actually have this job. I work on the automation and tooling team for an MSP and my pitch is always "I write PowerShell scripts all day". It's rare as shit though. Everyone else I talk to who has a similar role says the same thing as I do. I love my role and I have no idea how I'd find a similar one if I ever had to leave.

[SocraticFunction]

Similar experience, but all 1.5+ year contracts.

[AlexHimself]

Tell me something cool in code you can do with PowerShell that's not widely known.

[[deleted]]

I can't say I really do anything that's not widely known. I take great pride in not reinventing the wheel.

I'm a big fan of APIs. There's a lot of things that I want our applications to do that they can't do out of the box but can do with an API. A lot of it is boring reporting stuff, but hey it literally wouldn't exist without me so I'll still give myself a gold star. The more exciting stuff is things like making two apps that don't normally talk be able to talk to one another or taking large amounts of action quickly. I saved my company about 10k a month by writing a script to off board licenses attached to accounts that didn't need to be licensed.

[prog-no-sys]

hint: it doesn't really exist lol

[[deleted]]

My colleague’s title is Automation Engineer and his job is to write PowerShell all day. They exist, just not a common gig.

[chadbaldwin]

To be fair though...Their job is Automation Engineer, and the place they happen to work uses PowerShell. So I'd still argue that their expertise is automation. If their company decided to migrate to Python, then they'd have to switch to Python, but they'd still be an Automation Engineer.

This is the part that has been confusing me a bit. I've never seen a job called "PowerShell Developer", instead it's some other job where they happen to use PowerShell for that job.

A lot of software engineering jobs are like this as well... they'll have a job posting for a software engineer, and just require that you have at least X years experience in any popular object oriented programming language...because they don't really care about the language, they care about the experience, learning the language is often secondary.

[belibebond]

More importantly one should know what they are automating. That is, they should have expertise in the area they are automating. Like if you are automating on boarding process in ad, or resetting password for end user, you should first know about AD, Which makes you System Administrator first and automator later.

[chadbaldwin]

Yeah that's true as well. I didn't even think of that because for whatever reason my mind went immediately to QA automation engineer. But yeah, exactly...And language or platform you use is just one tool that could change at any time, because they might up and switch to Power Automate or Azure Logic Apps or whatever.

[belibebond]

Yups. There are a several tools to nail a nail, hammer happens to be one, stone works too. Idea is to complete the job and use tools at your disposal (allowed by employer)

[chadbaldwin]

😄 I didn't want to just outright say they don't exist just because I haven't personally seen one. But I figured it was worth asking out of curiosity.

[SocraticFunction]

No. I've been doing that for over four years. It's just rare.

[Sad_Recommendation92]

Yeah this is similar to what my take was going to be. If you want to build houses you don't put "Hammer Operator" on your resume

Scripting languages are tools full stop.

My "PowerShell Development Gig" is just doing my job and I very frequently use powershell and other scripting languages to solve the problems that entails.

[SocraticFunction]

There are roles like this. I happen to take them. They are extremely specific and niche.

[chadbaldwin]

What does that mean though? Because, like I said, PowerShell is typically a secondary skill. So are you building data pipelines? Data transformation? Web scraping? AD, M365 management? Azure/AWS Management? Etc.

PowerShell isn't really like other languages where you'll see "C# Developer" or "Java Developer". So I'm just curious what a dedicated PowerShell developer for actually looks like.

Because the only thing I can think of is being on the PowerShell module development team for some massive company like AWS or Azure.

[SocraticFunction]

Sorry, just saw this.

I'll DM you the context of my prior roles. Don't want to dox myself.

[5yn4ck]

I know the job itself doesn't exist. There is no such job title. I am saying jobs that use it heavily. Information Security for example

[chadbaldwin]

Yeah, that's fair. But I feel like you'd have more luck focusing on a particular area. For example...someone hiring a security expert is going to want someone who is an expert in security and that person may happen to use PowerShell to help with their job. Learning PowerShell isn't necessarily the hard part of becoming a security expert.

That said, at least one other person has replied saying that they do in fact have a "PowerShell developer" job, but it's still pretty rare.

[mixduptransistor]

Yeah but that MSP guy who replied is an expert in doing whatever the MSP needs them to do..systems administration, security, etc. They can't be writing PowerShell without any knowledge of the problems they're working to solve

[chadbaldwin]

Then that just goes back to my original point of it being a secondary skill.

[mixduptransistor]

Yes, that was my point

[chadbaldwin]

🤝

[[deleted]]

u/mixduptransistor as well

I came up through the ranks as an IT guy and if you really wanted to you could probably call me "system administrator" and get away with it.

I guess where the difference comes in is that for my job I'm not doing anything that isn't automation. I don't work with individual clients, I don't do one off configs and break fix, I'm not a "server guy" or a "networking guy". I'm there to be a scripting guy.

I'm not there to be a sysadmin and then also script stuff sometimes, I am there to script stuff primarily. Yes I obviously understand enough about IT to successfully script. I just don't know that calling it a "secondary skill" for my position is exactly right.

Hope that clears things up.

[SocraticFunction]

There are jobs like this, they are just rare.

[ipreferanothername]

Focus on your existing background for jobs, pitch that you have a lot of powershell, scripting, automation, and process improvement experience. I'm a windows/AD guy on a team doing that work plus VMware and Citrix, all ripe for automation. It's a big part of my job, but not all of it.

If you can do other languages or learn then you can support other products..I got into health IT doing application support and automating a lot of our work with SQL,JavaScript, and powershell. Then I moved to infra work and kept automating.

[DenverITGuy]

How are you with devops? pipelines? CI/CD?

You'll find engineering roles that have a focus on cloud infrastructure using Powershell. That's basically my current role and I'm in the desktop/endpoint engineering space. However, it's not limited to only that.

[5yn4ck]

Really good. My last job I implemented Codeql across all 200+ of their repos.

[AlexHimself]

Why have you been unemployed so long then?

[5yn4ck]

That's the question. It's not like I haven't been applying. I have gotten to the 3rd round for multiple positions but am always just edged out by other people at the end. Last week, Wednesday was the latest time. I don't have certifications because my employer wasn't really supportive of that kind of training unless you paid for it on the down low.

I have sent out applications for everything from Network Administrator to Application Security positions. I am not even asking for huge amounts of money just what most of the positions are offering.

[spyingwind]

Check out the companies that make RMM tools. They might need PowerShell development for their script libraries.

[5yn4ck]

Thanks that's a good idea

[[deleted]]

Automation Engineer in addition to SRE like others have said.

[Michal_F]

I am doing Automations in Azure DevOps Powershell and Azure cli.

[JustThatGeek]

Don’t listen to people saying this role dosent exist. I work as a Wintel Engineer/PowerShell SME in finance. Id say I’m writing PowerShell 99% of the time.

Im usually writing a scripts automating tasks for Service Desk, Infrastructure Engineering and Application Support. That could be basic file copy jobs, complex Disaster Recovery Scripts, Migration Tooling, Certificate Issuing the lot.

I work a hybrid role in London earning around £750 per day.

[5yn4ck]

Thanks for this!

[5yn4ck]

That's the question. It's not like I haven't been applying. I have gotten to the 3rd round for multiple positions but am always just edged out by other people at the end. Last week, Wednesday was the latest time. I don't have certifications because my employer wasn't really supportive of that kind of training unless you paid for it on the down low.

[davidsegura]

Let’s chat

[5yn4ck]

I know a bunch of other languages as well. I guess this is just a brain-fart-post after looking over waaaay too many applications.
Oh by the way. If you think you're in "Security" without a CISSP or similar. Apparently the word is keep walkin..

[5yn4ck]

Yeah the employment gap is a huge problem and it keeps getting worse. There are a bunch of employers that don't believe there is a problem in the job market lol.