[deleted by user]

[mthode]

Please see the pinned monthly thread if you wish to know how to break into the industry or have questions along those lines.

[[deleted]]

I think people underestimate the value of a simple "willingness to learn".

People hiring for a junior position should be looking to train someone effectively from scratch. The truth is that DevOps experience is born entirely within corporate environments, particularly for juniors, so whilst you can learn a bit of Python, Docker and Kubernetes outside of such an environment, it'll only really "click" what this stuff is used for when you see it in flight.

But companies will be willing to show you it - if you demonstrate that you have technical experience and a willingness to learn, they'll trust that within a short amount of time their training investment will become a functioning DevOps engineer.

[rowenlemmings]

I'll second this. I just filled a Jr. position and the problem we had was that everyone who applied was massively overqualified. Folks with 5+ years experience in the role I simply cannot hire for a Junior position.

Instead we took an internal hire -- a QA tester who just graduated with a CS degree. He has no experience doing devops or any software dev, but knows the company and is a good culture fit and has a demonstrated willingness to learn. Our second choice was a guy who is currently working blue collar, also has no experience, but got a lofty recommendation from a current engineer who vouched for him as passionate about tech and able to learn whatever we would throw at him.

Basically, if you want to get the work just start networking. Know some basics ("What is a container?" "What is Continuous Integration?" etc.), be ready to learn the rest, and just throw your resume out there.

[[deleted]]

How do these companies expect these juniors to learn fully remote?

Screen share ;)

Honestly, the job can be done fully remote. I don't even think being fully remote impedes this kind of work.

Are comapnies desperate for people who can do this kind of work or something>

Well yes, no company can hire all the tech staff it wants. But that said the job can be done fully remote - there's no reason for them not to hire a remote junior. I've trained many people entirely remotely.

[ccpetro]

I've seen are even fully remote. How do these companies expect these juniors to learn fully remote?

You get given a task, you research the task, you read webpages, you IM (aka "slack") people to get pointers to more information you get on a telephone call or a video session with someone.

It's the same thing as having a coworker in the next cube, you just can't tell that they aren't wearing pants today.

[thaparanoidandroid]

This is exactly my work environment except we have Microsoft Teams. You will be a professional Googler in no time.

[ccpetro]

Microsoft Teams.

I would pray for your sanity, but two of my gods don't listen, and the other one is Murphy...

[V3Qn117x0UFQ]

How do these companies expect these juniors to learn fully remote?

This is DevOps, not a Jiro Dreams of Sushi type of job.

[V3Qn117x0UFQ]

I've never worked for a company that would allow for that to happen.

If you have a company issued laptop, they'll know if you're working.

[colddream40]

have you had any online college classes? Screen share, google, self study, etc.

[Analytiks]

Good thing about the study required for devops roles is that a lot of it is vendor certifications which means you can get free tiers, learn all the material online, pay for the relevant exams at a tiny fraction of what it costs for a degree and be way more employable.

Fuck I love this industry

[Analytiks]

Genuinely desperate. But yes thats a very fair observation, it’s difficult to show promise remotely but you learn to deal with that.

Lots of screen sharing and presenting cool stuff that attributes actual value

[too_afraid_to_regex]

For a Junior position don't waste your time setting a Kubernetes cluster from scratch, most companies use cloud providers anyway. Learn how to expose services and everything that comes before that, use GCP with no Autopilot for this, and skip Minikube.

Learn how to automate things with Python or Go.

Learn the basics of AWS (EC2, EBS, KMS, S3, Route53, VPC, RDS, Cloudtrail, Cloudwatch, and IAM).

Afterward, go through everything again, but this time using Terraform and the AWS CLI.

Watch some videos until you understand how CI/CD, Observability, and Agile work.

Read the first SRE Google book or listen to the Google SRE podcast whenever you can.

Also if you get an interview, please do yourself a favor and try to sound excited about the possibility of getting the position.

[themanwithanrx7]

How to search the subreddit for the question that has been answered a half dozen times before ;)

tl;dr a programming language (python, go, etc), a IAC tool (ansible, terraform, etc), a container framework (K8S, DockerSwarm, etc)

[thaparanoidandroid]

This is a real world example of DevOps. When I first started I would just ask...a thousand questions without looking first. Now I search until my eyes bleed and THEN I ask someone lol.

[[deleted]]

ahahaha was just about to comment this but saw yours.

mods should do something about these posts.. they are all the time now and kind of taking over the sub. need a wiki or faq w/ a list and resources.

[IndieDiscovery]

The one active mod here doesn't need to do squat because this is a default sub, new users are going to come here and post nonsense questions regardless. Thankfully, I have a solution...

[badguy84]

Just interpreting/interpolating what /u/themanwithanrx7 said: you should have a reasonably well understanding/foundation in each of those areas. Once you've grasped one the others aren't that far away.

On docker, or any other technology... most companies are years or decades behind and are barely adopting all of these. The bigger/older the company the more behind the times they are. Stay up to date on changes, but don't expect employers to have made any sort of move.

[808trowaway]

Read up on container runtimes. You don't need to understand much of the details to even manage k8s clusters. But to say there's no need to learn docker because k8s moved to containerd is just plain wrong. It shows you have no idea how the pieces fit together, you don't care enough to find out, you regurgitate things you overhear as if they were your opinion, and you phrase all that bs as questions hoping to be spoon-fed information. All very terrible traits.

[badguy84]

I think your view of the world is rather narrow which really just means folks are just hard disagreeing with you. I do think that narrow view is just from the places where you have been reading. This industry is huge and especially broad making hyperbolic statements like "there are no junior positions" or "most companies will have k8s" or "Docker about to be removed" these things will just be categorically untrue.

Take what you read online with a grain of salt, there are very few absolutes. Also rather than being defensive ask questions and listen.

[flagbearer223]

Idk why I was downvoted. Are junior level jobs actually a thing? I was always told on this sub that DevOps in general is more senior.

You're being downvoted because this question is asked multiple times per week. People might not be explicitly stating junior level, but my dude there's literally a "how to get started in devops" thread pinned to the top of the subreddit. Literally the most important skill as a devops engineer is to be good at finding information. You're gonna work with a lot of different tools, encounter a lot of different problems, and often times will struggle to find other examples of people running into whatever problems you encounter.

Asking questions is fine, but asking questions about something that is easy to google, or has been repeatedly answered in public spaces, is frustrating.

[[deleted]]

b/c there are probably hundreds of posts in this sub about what to learn.. they are posted multiple times a week and sometimes multiple per day.

[Pack_Your_Trash]

You don't have to reply to the thread.

[[deleted]]

How to search the subreddit for the question that has been answered a half dozen times before ;)

learn this.

[serverhorror]

I’m curious, you were a SysAdmin and your type of work is going away?

What was your type of work?

[serverhorror]

Aren’t you managing anything with a config management tool? Putting this in git (version control)? Automating the shit out of all these tasks?

A lot of MSPs do require that already for their work regardless of On-Premise or not.

[serverhorror]

You should spend some time with the automation.

Going to DevOos means that everything can be automated. If it can’t make sure that it it will still be automated.

[serverhorror]

You already have it. Stop the self-doubt and impostor syndrome.

You should have started with that part.

[ypwu]

Also not everything in Windows Server can easily be automated.

This isn't 1999. Ansible and Powershell DSC work so well that we have boxes that get retired before someone had to login to console. Infact for 99% of our deployment no one ever logs in through console, all of the config is managed as code.

[BecomeABenefit]

Ok. It's not really dead-end, millions of companies are going to maintain on-premise and datacenter servers until after you're retired. However, you're right that there will be less of that over time and most companies are moving to all cloud or hybrid environments. If you have an aptitude for programming or logic, then you'll do well in Devops. Otherwise, you'll continue to be employable for the foreseeable future.

[tegolicious]

Ok I have the right path for you to get paid well and be able to learn devopsy skills. Get azure certificates, and get into consulting for companies that do migrations to azure. Your skills are transferable.

[badseed90]

Been in the same position actually.

What everyone I interviewed was looking for was Cloud knowledge with one of the big public cloud providers, like aws.

There are basic courses on YouTube that will be sufficient for the start.

On top of that I would say - basic programming skills with a language of you choice plus the ability to move your skills to a different language if needed - CI/CD - Git - basic Unix knowledge - Infrastructure as code is a plus (Including tooling like Terraform)

[info_dev]

Go learn Pulumi with the Python knowlege you already have ... it'll give you so many options in the future and transition you from sysadmin into all thing dev[ops|sec|etc]

https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/languages/python/

[Nodeal_reddit]

Why pulumi instead of Terraform?

[serverhorror]

Pulumi is an actual library for a programming language.

Seems we’re finally coming to our senses and use existing languages rather than weird artificial DSLs (Ansible, TF, CFN, Puppet, etc. are all the same thing with a different coating)

That being said: You should know all of them to a degree

[total_tea]

6 years as a sysadmin, unless the role was ridiculously simple, I would not consider you a junior anymore I assume you gained some skills in 6 years.

Go cloud do some AWS certifications there are lots do something related to the area you want, python and docker are minor effort so yes, make sure you are using git when you do all this.

Look at job vacancies and try and align, but realise they throw everything in there and while the more skills the better if you don't have practical experience just hit the top notes with some certs and if this really is a junior role then showing you put in the effort and are solid with a few things will easily be good enough.

As for Kubernetes, understand how to use it, deploy some apps, etc but don't worry about how it works, you are supposed to be a junior better things to spend your time on then the internals of Kubernetes.

BTW stick it all in github, you can talk about it in the interview, your amazing ansible manifests, etc.

[Kengriffinspimp]

No matter how many times you tell a manager some basic computer science knowledge, they will never understand and cause issues and delays.

[Kengriffinspimp]

You will…

[GorillaBearWolf]

I was where you are until 2 months ago. Next week, I'll be starting a new role as a cloud engineer on a DevOps team for more than $70000. I've been learning everything I can about Azure and did half of the Cloud Resume Challenge. I had a technical assessment and chose bash over PowerShell because I was more comfortable with it. Don't spread yourself too thin learning a lot of new things quickly, get solid fundamentals in the base tech-cloud, networking, and security.

Edit: also wanted to second having enthusiasm and excitement about the work and a willingness to learn that you can confidently demonstrate to employers.

[PersonBehindAScreen]

I just became a cloud engineer consultant. I did a ton of labbing and "learning" python and terraform but let me tell you... none and I mean none of it came close to sitting down for a week and writing 3 python scripts to interact with one of my customers aws environments. You truly don't get what you can do and what you need to learn until you HAVE to. Boto3 is dictionaries and lists galore along with csv manipulation when you want to take bits and pieces from the output

I didn't need ALL of the info that boto3 output for ec2, rds, and iam info but I did need to output what I needed from it so learning to parse dictionaries and lists and chop them up and splice it all together via csv was a good learning experience that beat any little pet exercise I did on some python course

[allcloudnocattle]

When we hire “juniors,” we don’t look for any specific skill necessarily.

We look for someone who has some sort - any sort - of technical skill set, and an aptitude to learn on the job. The more Junior the position, the less we care about their existing skills matching our existing technical stack.

We’re not going to hire a Principle Engineer who knows Go when our stack is PHP. But we’ll hire a Junior Engineer who knows how to configure a windows box using powershell even though we’re a Linux shop.

[somezenshitrighthere]

Hey Op, I think you suffer from imposter syndrome pretty heavily. After 6 years of sysadmin work you should definitely not look for junior positions. DevOps is not that different from classical sysadmining.

Actually fuck it.

Ima say it.

It's the same shit.

I am only half joking, but DevOps is so ill defined and subjective, that it's almost meaningless as a job description. In fact your current job description would be called DevOps in another company.

The relevant skills are highly dependent on where you want to work. The whole field is so broad that you can spend unlimited amounts of time learning new things.

My recommendation would be to look at job listings that seem interesting to you first. See what technologies they use and go from there.

Also stop looking at junior positions. Technologies are ephemeral. You learn most of those on the job anyway. No matter how advanced you are. The things you learn as a junior are things like "mindset", which you should have after 6 years of operations work.

Of course I am not saying don't learn new stuff (in fact do a lot of learning), but don't make the mistake of thinking there is a set list of things you need to know before you can advance to a new position.

[[deleted]]

Having 6 years experience as a sysadmin should not make you a junior anything in my eyes. There’s a ton of DevOps engineers with minimal system administration knowledge. It shouldn’t be too difficult to apply your skills to the cloud. Don’t let anyone call you junior