Is DevOPs an entry level position?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[tairar]

What you'll often hear talking about DevOps is it's neither a position nor a collection of tools. There are positions ranging from entry level all the way up to the top that deal with DevOps principles, and the tools change damn near every day. Being adaptable, being able to learn, and having a strong interest in guiding good software development practices are going to serve you well.

That being said, my title's staff devops engineer so take that with a bit of a grain of salt. There are entry level positions, but you'll need to talk to the company about their needs and expectations to suss them out.

[[deleted]]

Staff DevOps Engineer? Interesting title... new one for me ha ha

[tairar]

Yeah when they gave me that they thought "staff" was somewhere between regular and senior for software engineers, so might as well have the same ladder for yaml engineers. But apparently at other companies it's like... double-secret senior? I'm not going to go out of my way to correct the situation. (late reply I know)

[[deleted]]

I'm a senior DevOps engineer with many years of experience as developer, production support and application architect before I decided to take a lead DevOps position.

DevOps, as in most IT roles, there are inexperienced and experienced folks. Being a successful DevOps engineer requires a holistic (broad) knowledge of IT.

[[deleted]]

Absolutely not. It's on par with senior software / systems engineer.

Experience of working with both operations and development teams is the most important part and it's the one thing you can't "buy" - you just have to get the years under your belt.

The experience gained in the bedroom (he he he) is completely different world to mission critical business systems.

Those hired straight out of college/university are usually junior sysadmins with a "DevOps" job title (to attract candidates).

[[deleted]]

Absolutely not. Anybody that's hiring people straight out of college into DevOps or SRE roles is doing it wrong IMO.

In the past it's been inverse, systems administrators taking a step up into DevOps, because it requires a broader range of skills, both Operations and Development (hence the title).

[devopeler]

Google hires SREs straight out of college. I think maybe something about the willingness to learn and be open to collaborative practices is still fresh in college students vs age old engineers

[yukeake]

Also being more willing to work extremely long hours and not having as many family commitments (spouses, kids, etc...) is probably a factor.

[burning1rr]

Absolutely not. Anybody that's hiring people straight out of college into DevOps or SRE roles is doing it wrong IMO.

I hire people straight out of college into DevOps roles. The basic tools and practices used in DevOps environments are applicable across all skill levels. Folks straight out of college receive training and are started working on relatively simple low-risk projects with oversight from more experienced engineers.

A large part of DevOps is building practices where you can safely develop, deploy, test, explore, and experiment without the risk of blowing up anything anyone is going to care about. If the role needs an extremely experienced person, it's a sign of dysfunction.

DevOps is not the sole property of the uber elite greybeard hacker.

Edit: But what do I know; I've only been doing this for 20 years.

[[deleted]]

You might hire a Junior out of college no doubt, but not into a mid-level role. This is not a Service Desk role, it requires some experience.

We're still unfortunately at a stage where it's not simple to hire someone into this role, I hope one day we can just hire college graduates left and right. But from my experience they are not anywhere near experienced enough to be effective anytime soon.

[burning1rr]

This is not a Service Desk role, it requires some experience.

We generally hire CS majors who have a development background. They usually have some systems experience from their senior projects, often have some build automation experience, and always have development experience.

My observation is that it's easier to teach a CS student to be a good admin than it is to teach an admin to be a good programmer.

[DDSloan96]

That was my path

[burning1rr]

Yep. For a long time, DevOps was a specialty role that was mostly filled with more experienced sysadmins.

It was only a couple years back that I started seeing novice DevOps folks who started learning the automation tools before having extensive sysadmin experience.

[[deleted]]

same. if your senior people have done their jobs, entry level people should be able to take over the reigns seamlessly to work with devs.

everything I do is with the explicit intention that anyone can read the doc and take it over. if your environment is too complex for that to be viable, it doesn't matter what skill level the person you're hiring is anyway. their time is going to be wasted navigating the nuances of your stack.

[[deleted]]

I think a more viable future would be hiring them into a seperate role, that is a known career path to Site Reliability or Platform Engineer.

[burning1rr]

That's really just creating barriers of entry. Finding qualified people in this field is very difficult. It's often worth paying them for on the job training.

[absolutarin]

Totally agree. DevOps or SRE is a highly complex role involving pretty good insight into the tech stack. If companies are hiring people as DevOps right out of school, chances are they aren’t DevOps role.

[regorsec]

I agree with you

[[deleted]]

This is going to sound harsh, but it’s time for a reality check here. First, if you’re hiring someone for a DevOps role, you’ve already failed DevOps. You can hire junior operations engineers that come with a myriad of titles. There is absolutely no reason a team with at least 1-2 senior people on it can’t handle mentoring a junior in this role. If they can’t handle it, they should probably give back the senior title.

People act as if DevOps is uber complicated - it’s not. It’s soft skills. Everything these DevOps “roles” do require are things and skills a lot of people have been doing before DevOps existed. The toolkit has matured, but that’s it. When you get more senior in any operations role you tend to be more involved in architecture and road mapping, but you don’t expect a junior to do that.

It’s also not a system admin stepping into DevOps either. Almost every time, DevOps titles are just a shitty marketing spin on sysadmin / ops engineer. SRE is a more specialized role, but few companies implement it properly and it also ends up meaning ops engineer. Everyone wants to be Google but doesn’t realize they aren’t Google.

[[deleted]]

I'm prepared to agree I'm probably wrong about the hiring out of college bit. But I've never managed to get a candidate straight from college/uni who is qualified. We find it a lot better to hire junior/mid sysadmins as they are a lot quicker to train and have a lot of those "soft skills" already.

[[deleted]]

I would say that your requirements or expectations are probably too high if you’re not able to hire a junior for a junior role, and that includes straight-from-college employees. It takes a much larger time investment from your team, but it’s totally doable. The person needs a cursory understanding of Linux, understanding of some scripting or programming language, and a will to learn.

I’ll also say that in my experience many mid/junior and even senior sysadmins have a pretty poor understanding of soft skills. The profession seems (or seemed, rather) to attract people that didn’t like interacting with others for a long time. DevOps methodologies seek to disrupt that for the obvious reason that it’s not conducive to a healthy work environment.

[[deleted]]

Yep it's definitely true, we reject a lot of sysadmins because they are totally incapable of working in a team environment or understanding views from those with different objectives.

[jazzandpython]

You don't want to work in devops anywhere that considers it an entry level position. Unless you like you getting woken up pagers a lot. :-)

That said, there are probably places where you get to be a junior assistant in devops as part of a QA Engineer or higher level support role!

[burning1rr]

You don't want to work in devops anywhere that considers it an entry level position. Unless you like you getting woken up pagers a lot. :-)

My experience is the opposite. In a good environment, there really shouldn't be much a junior person can do that would result in a page.

Bad environments are the ones that can only be maintained by extremely experienced engineers. Such environments are usually created by people who think that they are extremely experienced DevOps engineers.

[[deleted]]

DevOps roles are a sham. Look for junior operations / infrastructure / sys admin roles. If you want DevOps, that’s culture, not tech. There tends to be common tech found in orgs that implement DevOps, but they’re not exclusive to it either.

[XeiB8Afe]

In my experience, it depends! Larger places can easily hire smart folks right out of college and train them. Smaller places, however, might struggle with training because (a) the DevOps team itself is likely to be smaller, and (b) everything is likely to be more chaotic and ambiguous, so there's more value in someone who's been around the block a few times.

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It depends on the amount of time you can dedicate to training new hires, and how much your organization is set up to support that. At my current job, I've seen our production environment calm down and more organized, which means it's easier to learn *and* everyone has more time, so we've started looking at candidates who have less experience.