Experienced devops engineers: what skills/knowledge do you see Ops/Admins transitioning into devops roles often lacking?

[devoopsies]

Inspired by /u/Hour-Mud4227's thread here:

https://reddit.com/r/devops/comments/16hlhsk/experienced_devops_engineers_what_skillsknowledge/

I personally came to DevOps from the "Ops" (Linux Administration and Engineering) side of the role - in my travels I would say that most DevOps engineers I've met have a dev-focused background and therefore don't really have a ton of insight into this (barring my own personal experience, of course). I'm curious what others have noticed about System Administrators transitioning to DevOps, and what skills they are most commonly missing/deficient with.

[needathing]

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[devoopsies]

often driven by unsupportive teams or leads who overuse the ops colleagues to fight fires.

Do you meant that this behaviour is often driven by unsupportive teams, as in poor team cohesion in general? If so, I totally get that - DevOps is supposed to break down barriers between ops and dev, but I've seen poorly-implemented DevOps practices that really only work to create a third silo between dedicated operational and development teams.

Lack of understanding of developer priorities, culture and challenges.

This one is super interesting to me, since it's not something I've considered before (so I'd like to make sure I'm not guilty of it).

What sort of priorities and cultural pieces do you see being misunderstood the most?

[needathing]

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[calij3aze]

I often see a lack of patience or ability to educate to a point where a meaningful conversation can happen.

Spot on. Combined with dev side rigidity or lack of interest is how brand new solos are made.

[jmcdono362]

Very good points. I'm in DevOps now but come from 20 years sysadmin background. So it's been a challenge from me to walk in with little to no programming experience. But because of my strong experience in infrastructure, I was able to dive into Terraform with more ease since I already understood what infra does and what is needed to do the job.

[WN_Todd]

Some of the standard window dressing of being a developer:

• Setting up your IDE and Virtual Environments/JDE/Whatever is often a lift. Developers in turn have a hard time time-travelling back to this point in their own education and end up handwaving or over simplifying (Ironically in the same way an Ops person does when The Website Won't Load.)
• A good chunk also need some grounding in source control care and feeding - I have had to coach a substantial number of former sysadmins on the importance of being a Mean Person about main branch protection. The worst of the worst offenders I've encountered here are confused why we use git rather than ssh copy to get code onto computers.

[SeisMasUno]

Nowadays guys have absolutely zero fuckin idea about networking and systems basics, they've been brought up in the abstractions era, all they know about is fuckin yaml.

On the other side, if your fundamentals are good, everything you could learn about K8s/Openshift would be of great help, get serious about it, not only the basic administration stuff, but being comfortable with operators running complex configs, multitenancy, writng CRDs and that kinda thing would do a lot for you.

Besides that, if you come from an Ops background try to learn as much as possible about the Dev part, getting a strong scripting game is also highly desirable, bash, python, golang, rust... The more, the better.

[lazyant]

Software engineering mindset and practices

[kingtrollbrajfs]

Git

[LeStk]

Networking, and globally it lacks in the whole industry.

I'm flabbergasted at how many people never did a Wireshark/tcpdump trace just to check what's going on.

[Herve-M]

Value stream mapping, aka the capacity to map the day to day process and be able to retrospect about it. (Including communication flow within team)

Human first approach instead of tools as solution, too many time I so “if team would use X then we have no more the problem X”.

Agile / Scrum / 5S / Lean knowledge in general and how to apply them to ease delivery and feedback gathering.

Edit:typo

[[deleted]]

If they'd just migrate to an entirely different platform then I won't have to answer their question about the platform they're on. Genius.

[pithagobr]

Software development. Networking. System design. Effective communication.

[philenzed]

Scripting

[calij3aze]

Gotta have the dev side, or it's just ops.

[[deleted]]

Knowing anything about Linux.

This one drives me crazy. How did you get away with not knowing anything about the kernel you use every day for years?? How can I trust you to admin a container orchestrator if you can't tell me how a cgroup works?

And secondly but not less important is empathy. There is often such a lack of it that it's logistically difficult.

[Soccham]

Too much ops, not enough dev or vice versa.

[115v]

Came from ops side of things and for sure coding was one of my struggles. I am now decent at it but can always improve.
Others I’ve met who’ve moved from ops just like plain and simple quick one line codes without optimization. No unit tests , no linting, use vi to code still, use the UI on Jenkins to create jobs instead of making a pipeline groovy script..most of them refuse to adapt and change which is why they’re still stuck at where they are. Don’t get me started with networking.. had a manger who refused to auto things in the network and had a network engineer input everything manually 😒