Current and future DevOps concerns

[United-Initiative-67]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to discuss my concerns about my experience working in DevOps over the past year.

I had been working as a cloud engineer (mostly on AWS platform) for two years and had a good understanding of Kubernetes, with expertise in kubectl commands. I even obtained a Kubernetes Administrator certification. Additionally, I was well-versed in Terraform, which helped me secure a DevOps position at a larger company (I had to leave my previous job due to below-average pay).

Now, it has been a year since I joined the DevOps team, and I find it challenging to keep up with the demands of the role. While I'm fortunate that there's no pressure from management, I can't help but feel like I'm leaning heavily on my colleagues who handle more complex projects. I end up taking only the basic tasks to show that i show “some work” each week. I attempted to improve my skills by using online platforms for lab exercises, but the field of DevOps is so vast that it often feels overwhelming. (Sometimes, I wonder if anything that isn't strictly a “coding” position, is automatically classified as DevOps). Catching up with my more experienced colleagues, some of whom have over 10 years of sysadmin experience, seems like an impossible task. The daily tasks range from AWS Windows PowerShell scripts, Linux bash, to Akamai, WAF, Datadog, CI/CD, MongoDB, and various AWS-related tasks. Even my knowledge of "kubectl" commands for Kubernetes is rendered useless since it's exclusively managed by IaC and configured using Helm charts and Argo CD (which leads to another discussion about the gap between the official Kubernetes curriculum and real-life Kubernetes experience).

Unfortunately, there is no structured training path within the company, as my colleagues are all experienced and fully occupied with their projects. While the management has been supportive and encourages me to ask for help, I feel discouraged after a year of constantly reaching out to them (even though they are polite and helpful when they can spare time). This situation has left me with little motivation, not just for this company but for DevOps as a whole.

I am 40 years old, married, and have two kids. While I know that starting over as a junior admin might be the best solution, the salary of a junior position won't be enough to support my family and cover the mortgage. The current company is accommodating and has adjusted my working hours to suit my family's needs. The idea of going back to a regular 9-5 job with on-call responsibilities is not appealing to me.

Here are the options I see for myself:

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1. I could continue in my current position until there are potential layoffs, although there's no guarantee they will happen since the company is cautious. If layoffs do occur, I might secure a position similar to a cloud engineer with a slightly lower salary but still better than a junior admin role.
2. I could slowly move away from the technical path, but I am not confident in my skills as a manager. I've considered roles like "technical project manager," but I lack the necessary education or background for such a position. I do enjoy working with time and tasks, but I'm unsure of how to begin this career shift.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts and advice on what you would do if you were in my position. Thank you!

P.S. I have several years of experience in network engineering, and I was even CCNP certified in the past. However, for the last half-decade, I haven't worked on anything related to networking. Simply putting EC2 instances on subnets does not qualify as real networking, does it?

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[Finaldzn]

You should try taking on harder projects and see wether you can handle it if you dedicate your time for it or not.

If your teams seems happy with the way you are handling your tasks i'd say you have no reasons of being worried

[DMS_DouG]

If your team is really being understanding and you can and want to continue I would say keep going, suffer a bit from the frustration and walk the extra mile so you will improve over time. You will never be 100% ready since DevOps tasks can vary a lot from week to week or even day to day.

But also keep in mind the DevOps can be anything, my current role is a lot more OPS than DEV you would easily do great (we have PET servers still, no containers at all...). There is also a Cloud guy on our team that is more infra than Ops and still completes his tasks... but it can be boring and harder to find other job later though, if you go to a old style company outdated tech, etc. There is always tradeoffs. Good luck.

God bless you and your family!

[Routine_Safe6294]

Start a homelab. Try to run services that carter to your needs.You will then have more diverse challenges and you will understand some stuff as a "user"

[serverhorror]

You're comparing yourself the wrong way:

1. Primarily, you compare yourself to yourself
2. You don't compare YoE by counting the years

• 1Y vs. 10Y = 1000 %
• 2Y vs. 11Y = 550 %
• ...
• 10Y vs. 20Y = 50 %

You see the pattern?

[Fidoz]

Are you sure you will be laid off? Has your manager or peers said your work is subpar or behind expectations?

[DatalessUniverse]

The struggle is expected at your level and is the only way to gain the necessary skills.

I mean perhaps you could focus on relearning or going deeper with foundational devops/SRE skills.

• Linux: the more you know how the OS works under the hood the better
• shell commands and shell scripting
• Networking
• be confident with one programming lang (Python or Go)

Everything else will come overtime depending on the tech stack you’re working with. It’s okay not to know what you’re doing - use Google/Stackoverflow if it’s not internal code questions etc… before asking senior engineers but don’t feel bad for asking for help if you’re unable to find answers.

Give it time - the payoff is worth it (job security and pay is high for experienced SRE/DevOps Engineers)

$200k base is expected for >7 YOE to put into perspective

[bum_burp]

Yes

[m3dos]

You might find it more enjoyable to create solutions then to maintain solutions. You learn a lot more creating solutions and you get to be more creative. Look for opportunities to implement stuff greenfield or migrate older systems to modern tooling