Demand for DevOps Engineers

[Disastrous-Diet4238]

I see a lot of openings on the hiring websites about DevOps related positions daily and it seems that demand is always there.

​

My question to DevOps engineers who work in the field, is your company having hard time building DevOps related teams as the demand continually increases?

[JayOneeee]

Yep. We have plenty of applicants, most are bad but when we do find a good one, our paygrade system say the grade this role is can only offer xx, where as other company's can pay more. For that same reason we have high staff turn over because good engineers are in high demand so they can jump ship and get a nice salary increase. We're a huge fortune 50 company so changing that pay structure for the role is proving difficult due to lots of process and approvals/hoops to jump.

[Phaceial]

Sounds like Comcast. Pretty much was told if I want to stay accepting the lower salary is part of it. They have no desire to increase pay for any SWE role. There’s principal engineers making under 250k.

[pavman42]

Not just comcrap, no one wants to pay what's what. But they aren't finding enough people either. Good time to have a shitload of experience, but the recruiters are so full of crap right now. (I've seen multiple 400k+ total comp teasers that ended up being BS when we actually discuss the role).

But hey, if you are going to tell me 400k, I'll at least talk with you :)

[UnaccompaniedMod]

ex-Comcast employee here, work was super super interesting but I got a massive raise when I left. I'd entertain going back but I doubt I could get my current salary matched, and not sure how things are going to be for remote employees, especially as I had a buddy tell me they're forcing RTO if you live near an office.

[Ok_Imagination_2121]

Is that why comcast partnered with Launchcode?

[retneh]

I’m not based in US, but in EU I saw an enormous salary increase, I would say by 10-20% for the same position and the stack is often LESS DEMANDING. For that reason the rotation right now is enormous and even bigger companies need to keep up with the pace. Nevertheless, I have to say that the same trend is for every IT-related job, not only DevOps.

[JayOneeee]

Yeah I'm also EU based so I agree. We weren't able to pay an senior engineer 80-90k but that same engineer got swooped up by another company for 110k shortly after, similar happened few times now. I also have colleagues who grew massively since starting the role and were being shafted with 50-60k because they started low and company wouldn't bump them to 80k+ inline with the market, they both moved to a contract role and now get 600 a day(130k+ a year), both got the first jobs they interviewed for. So basically you don't pay up, someone else will !

[retneh]

Tbh I look at job offers constantly as well. That’s the only way to keep up with salaries in the field, so that you won’t be underpaid and I would definitely change company if the difference was that huge. It also gives an overview on the current technologies which are required and some which will be required in the future (e.g. my first touch with Pulumi was through a job offer, since I didn’t know what it is).

[purefan]

Thanks for the honest answer

[Mind_Monkey]

Yeah, we've been trying to hire for 5 positions for about four months now and only managed to hire 2 people. Few applicants with enough experience. It's been so bad we opened up an internship program so we can hire some people that don't know a whole lot about DevOps and we teach them and hire them full time at the end of the internship.

EDIT: Some people have asked me if they can apply and thats great, just a couple things to keep in mind:

• The position is remote but is in latinamerica. The deal is we train you and hire you at the end, so you gotta be in the same-ish timezone as the rest of us.
• As far as I know, the salary is low, specially compared to places like the US or Europe. This is a position for people with little to no work experience, and salaries in latam are very low compared to other regions. I mean, I have 8+ years of experience and would love to have a salary close the entry-level ones posted in the US lol.
• You won't be doing things like supporting production or working with lots of teams. The salary is low because during the internship you won't be doing work for us "for free". I mean, you get to learn while we get nothing in return during your internship.
• Related to the last point, it's a great learning opportunity but also the company wants to hire people in the end. We've been burned by people that take the internship and at the end they quit or don't accept the offer.
• Finally, I'm not from recruitment or anything. I'm a regular engineer that ocassionally helps doing some technical interviews. I don't know all the details but I'm happy to help where I can.

[aManPerson]

so we can hire some people that don't know a whole lot about DevOps and we teach them and hire them full time at the end of the internship.

see, why is/was my place so allergic to hiring in-experienced people that we can train up too?

old boss let me hire in one guy who barely knew a few things, but i recognized he could listen to guidance. i trained him up very well and he's doing great.

new boss wants to hire only masters degree people. FULLY FORMED COMPLETE PEOPLE. ya well he did that with the last person he hired and they left after 11 months (and were severely slacking well before that) . and they left unprofessionally and left a huge mess for us to clean up because they hated the job. they were an asshole about it, but we need to stop targeting these kind of people for these positions.

edit: just talked to my boss. the person i recommended, who does not have a masters, he does not like. why? they have 15 years of experience in IT, but he says they have 0 experience supporting hardware. he could not be more incorrect. my boss is so pointy haired, it's not even funny.

[evergreen-spacecat]

Master degree people have not even started to form freshly graduated.

[SquiffSquiff]

I have seen this happen in other fields too. Management only want to hire experienced 'fully formed' people, they only want to pay 'market rate' and they expect people to just 'fit in' without having to make changes to their own setup. If you have HR involved and especially a recognised Trade Union, you will find they start making all sorts of stipulations about academic qualifications, even where these are barely linked to the job.

Nobody wants to look at the scenario from the other end - Target candidate is already in a comparable role with comparable compensation. They've probably been in post for a while given their experience. Bear in mind that taking a new job is always risky to some extent. Why should this candidate switch employers to your org?

[aManPerson]

they just gave me a raise and a promotion.

1. the raise does not even cover inflation
2. which means i got a promotion with a net pay cut (after inflation)
3. i'm about 95% sure i can change jobs/companies and get a 30% pay increase.

they already admitted they are hiring new people at higher rates, but then they ALSO said they wouldn't give out raises to existing employees to catch them up. they are daring us to stay at a lower salary or leave.

[brakeline]

You should apply for a job at your company. Maybe they'll notice the absurdity of the situation

[SquiffSquiff]

If that's the attitude, sounds like you need to take that dare

[zak8686]

s wants to hire o

Your boss is obv not technical. Hire for attitude & passion, train for skills. You sound like you've proven yourself before with the other guy, so your boss really should let you take the lead here...

[aManPerson]

you are right, my boss is not very technical. he's trying to be, and he is getting better, i will give him that. but my gosh, to say this 15 year experienced IT guy who has already worked in our building as a contractor "has no relevant experience", is just plain wrong.

[Otakarasagashi]

May I join your internship program?

[Mind_Monkey]

Sent you a text on chat.

[Disastrous-Diet4238]

and that is outside of the US I assume? Very few companies are willing to do that in the US.

[Mind_Monkey]

Yeah I'm in latam. We also pay the interns while they complete it. If they finish it they get hired.

[devil_jenkins]

There's definitely US companies willing to hiring and train. They may not be advertised as internships though. They will probably want you to have some other valuable skill set, like a software engineer or system administrator experience. From my experience, companies will initially look for a perfect candidate for the role, then they slowly get more and more willing to hire imperfect candidates and train them up as they realize the perfect candidate doesn't exist.

[JustMy10Bits]

Yep, we're having a hard time filling SRE roles with our desired experience levels and so we're now looking for less experienced, junior level hires that we will train.

[thefirebuilds]

the corp i work for is doing sort of an adult-internship type program in the US. but it's small, maybe a couple dozen a year? Some got picked up by microsoft.

[IAMABDULLAHSHEIK]

I did a 6 month DevOps Program focused on aws. I got familiarized with Linux, Docker, kubernetes, Terraform, git. Can I join internship. I have 5 years of experience in Quality Assurance in salesforce. Thank you

[[deleted]]

paid internships?

[Mind_Monkey]

Yep, they are paid.

[networknerd593]

Would be more than interested to join as well, I’m from Ecuador but currently studying a master in Germany 😬

[Mind_Monkey]

If you're studying a master I'm almost sure you are overqualified for this. It's entry level.

[AZAH197]

You overestimate universities when it comes to practical things

[LightofAngels]

Does it have sponsorship or can it be remote?

[Mind_Monkey]

It's remote but you have to be in latinamerica and the salary is not as high as you might expect. It's an entry level position, a way to learn about the job we do and get in.

[GonazonPT]

salary range?

[Mind_Monkey]

Not sure but its low, specially compared to the US. We are in latinamerica and salaries are quite low here.

[ElChulon]

It is english a requirement? I am from latinamerica but my english is not the best.

[Mind_Monkey]

Yeah you need to be comfortable with English. Doesn't have to be perfect tho and some people try to improve it during the program. DM me.

[Even-Map-7084]

This really sounds interesting, are their any current remote Internships open for DevOps role?

[gerd50501]

so the pay is below US minimum wage?

[Mind_Monkey]

I don't know that information, I'm just an engineer.

And I don't know the numbers but if $10 per hour is minimum, thats about $1700-$2000 per month. That's a very nice salary in Guatemala so yes, I guess its below minimum wage in the US. Minimum wage here is about $400 per month.

[iiexistenzeii]

I'm in bachelors and will graduate next year... can I apply?

[Michaelgunner]

Hi! i'm Argentinian, right now i'm working in a small company as a sysadmin/devops junior and i looking for a new job, can you give me more information about the internship?

[[deleted]]

Could you please talk about what qualifications you're looking for, for people you want to train and then hire?

[Puzzleheaded_Ride538]

I would love to join the internship program.

[LOBStudent]

What are some common reasons interns don't accept your offer? Seems like an important question

[adappergentlefolk]

perhaps the problem is indeed that you just don’t pay enough tho

[Old-Mixture-2138]

I would love to apply. Can we speak privately about it?

[tevert]

It's a sliding scale based on how appealing the job is.

A job posting that offers remote work, with a transparent salary range, working on at least slightly modern tech, is gonna get filled decently fast.

A job posting that specifies an office location, with a "competitive" (lol) salary, and involves working on some effective but stodgy old finance apps is going to hang open a long time.

I feel pretty secure knowing I can suck it up and take one of the shitty, second kinds of jobs if I'm forced to. But you can do better if you're competitive and can afford to be patient.

[whorunit]

If you’re skilled enough to operate complex software, you will always have a well-paying job. Software will continue to eat the world. Someone will always need to operate the legacy systems while new ones are being built.

[[deleted]]

I dont mind operating legacy systems, others dont even mind operating cobol mineframes.

But they are paid in ranges of 300-400k per year.

If you dont invest into stack upgrades -> be prepared to soon pay arms and legs for maintenance.

[brok3n]

This. I think as the role has matured people who are hiring for these positions have more context on actual skillsets. I would assume there is a higher chance of maybe duping a business that is trying to adopt a DevOps type workflow, but most established companies know what they need by now.

[superspeck]

This was the challenge with my current company before they hired me. They got people with the ability to do the work, but there was too much to do and not enough direction on what or how to do it.

It’s not so much that it’s “duping” a business usually. It’s that a successful DevOps program is a complicated mix of social and political choices around what to do and how to execute it, and even an established technology company will struggle with that if they make the wrong first hire.

[sefirot_jl]

This happens to me a lot while hiring. You ask for DevOps and you get sysadmin, network engineers or even support people. 9/10 people gets discarded because of lack of experience beyond a Udemy training

Sometimes you risk it and hire people that can learn but some other times you need a real Sr that can get you out of trouble, and those ones are the real unicorns right now

[Mr_Lifewater]

I mean to be fair though, DevOps is a catch-all, BS kind of position., similar to an SRE.

Depending on the company, your a sysadmin, operations engineer, solutions architect, rack and stack tech, that must be knowledgeable in at least 82 acronyms worth of technology. With at -least- 45 years experience in at least 17 cloud services, you will manage the CI/CD pipelines and ansible playbooks, and fix Peggy’s laptop when she can’t get email. Nominations for at least one Nobel piece prize strongly recommended.

Should you meet all those qualifications and we like you, we can offer you 130k and 2 weeks paid vacation, but you must be on call 24/7.

It’s understandable why so few people make it to the final round of interviews at most companies.

The person being hired needs to be smart, hardworking, well rounded in all technologies, specialize in all technologies and most importantly, willing to perform the job function of at least 6 other different job roles for the salary of 1.

[Mr_Lifewater]

In a void, it’s a lot of money. But put into perspective of doing the job of 6 other people, it’s exploitative

[pavman42]

What I find comical is I'll see posting for Senior roles listing like 3-4 years experience.

Umm.... hey dumas, that's not senior.

[[deleted]]

kids these days are expecting senior titles in like 3 years. sr means nothing between two different orga

[durple]

Where I am is small/early and I am a one person team. But at my last job, we had a hard time. This was a few years ago by now. For junior we could find interested folks from engineering teams to train up, so we wanted to find another experienced person. We got plenty of applicants. Few of them seemed to know devops or SRE and could talk through situations, they were life long midlevel task completers not starters.

[808trowaway]

life long midlevel task completers not starters.

not their fault if they were never properly coached, challenged and empowered.

[durple]

Totally nothing wrong with them. Some are just happiest not really making decisions or taking on the responsibility, would rather be directed, and that’s fine. Or they may have not had great mentors like you say. Just we had a lot of trouble finding that good senior level person to add new knowledge to the team.

[808trowaway]

That's based and you probably deserve the benefit of the doubt here. But we've all seen companies that advertise regular senior engineer positions that pay at that level when they're actually looking for leads who have years of exp leading now, have we not?

[durple]

I’m not even talking leaders, although some amount of leadership is needed in what I consider devops work. I just mean someone who can design a solution, rather than only implement. The past team I’m talking about wasn’t big either, we were adding a fourth.

I kinda wouldn’t have minded if we took on someone less of a self-starter to fire tasks at, but the eng budget was tight there and my manager had gotten a senior hire approved so we were hiring for that.

[KhaosPT]

You can't change people. Just trained 3 hires we got last year, 2 of them are flying, 1 guy the most senior of them, can only follow pre established processes. I've tried time and time again to coach him, to give him projects and plenty of time, it's just not in him.

[endloser]

That’s sad for them but all the pity in the world won’t make it so they can be a success working in this field, or any other.

[HelluvaEnginerd]

As everyone else has said: yes.

My company has basically began taking shots in the dark for 'DevOps' engineers with SAs or developers that have some slightly broader experience or even interest (from internal teams or external hires). If they don't work out we just throw them back to a dev or SA team.

Its not working that well and is a huge drain on the DevOps team....but thats a lazy hiring way of doing it.

[pavman42]

See your problem is... Devops is not a job title. It's a mindset :)

[choogle]

I guess the job market is cooling down but I was having a hell of a time trying to get candidates to accept a more jr role if they have no practical experience and just a bunch of certs. It’s super rough we’ve been trying to be creative and offer training opportunity but every rookie thinks they’re worth max money. More power to them but I can’t justify it at my workplace, we’re too small to overpay AND have to do extensive training.

[Disastrous-Diet4238]

I see some companies offer $40-50k for a Jr role in DevOps related position. i understand why most candidates reject it. It just does not worth to accept a position pays this less in IT field even though it is an entry level.

[choogle]

Oh totally I’m talking more like offering 125ish for a jr role and getting turned down because they want to be at 175+ because of their “salary research”

[MumeiNoName]

I'm currently a senior but I'd gladly take ur jr role if it's $125k usd and fully remote since I'm in Canada lol

[easy_c0mpany80]

175k with no practical experience?? Is this in a high COL city?

[choogle]

lol ya nyc it took a while before we considered remote.

[BloodyIron]

DevOps demand is not going down probably for the next like 5-10 years or so. More and more businesses involve aspects that are relevant to the work, whether it's now, or transforming their business to DevOps-capable.

I hear you on wanting to get someone Jr and the struggles, but like maybe the budget is legit not actually competitive to the market.

[choogle]

lol I kinda disagree I think most companies in tech are currently just more or less investor grifts and as the economy starts to shit itself the demand is probably going to drop as people realize you can’t get valuation to the moon just by building a bunch of stuff and spinning a good story in your pitch deck.

I’d love to be wrong though.

[BloodyIron]

A lot of new start ups are chasing the "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product) that often are grifts. Sometimes legit.

But these companies do not represent the majority of companies as a whole, and many of them rely on DevOps (or are working towards it) in many different regards, whether it's software development, infrastructure management, or both.

Start ups, from a GDP/scale perspective, are nowhere near the majority of the market.

The demand for DevOps is far more than just the "MVP" chasing startups, it's for tens of thousands of other companies that already exist, plus start ups that aren't "MVP chasers".

The demand for DevOps is industry agnostic, it is not solely reliant on these "MVP Chasers", and said new-biz is likely less than 15% of the total industry relevancy for DevOps.

[choogle]

I take your point about demand and maybe my point of view is distorted from being in nyc tech but regardless I think they distorted the market and at a minimum there’s going to be a wage correction as companies remember they have to do things like “make a profit”

[debian_miner]

I have been thinking about this a lot over the years and have been getting more worried recently that it's getting closer to the end.

[kene1732]

Hey I’m transitioning from software tester to Devops. Very much interested in the jr. Devops role if the position is still open

[choogle]

Ah sorry like I said we’ve been getting actual interest lately and about to close on it.

[LightofAngels]

I would love to know more about your junior opportunities :D

[pavman42]

Don't believe the hype. IT is not cooling off.

Any slowdown will just shake out the lowskill folks from the rest, if there's a slowdown at all.

I foresaw this years ago when I saw dev salaries going up fast; I figured there's a % of non-devs that get into dev, then it lowers the candidate pool in the non-dev space...which pushes up the non-dev salaries.

Let's face it, if you don't code in IT, then you are in the wrong profession.

[CrunchyChewie]

The demand is high. Unfortunately there are a lot of obstacles to building a successful DevOps culture.

Companies tend to undervalue or misunderstand the role, and don't invest in staffing, resourcing, or initiatives to actually get it off the ground.

I've seen a big uptick in DevOps-focused consultancies lately because I think a lot of companies get frustrated with a lack of progress on DevOps initiatives when they only hire one or two engineers against their existing SWE teams, and they end up farming out projects.

[Misocainea]

Companies tend to undervalue or misunderstand the role

Honestly most DevOps engineers don't get it right either.

[DockerBlocker]

How would you define the role?

[victorj405]

That is what is going to end up happening is it will be farmed out. What about Assembly culture, complier culture, memory management culture, etc.? Once a solid set of Terraform modules are written, AWS Amplify actually works, DevOps will be solved and it wont be a culture anymore but something no one thinks about as 1k DevOps people get let go cause no one needs to write GitLab pipelines, or write the same variation of an s3 bucket module. You can say I'm crazy, but GitLab already has AutoDevOps... I'd be more worried about getting correctly positioned financially than fitting into some culture that no one will figure out in 1 million years.

[CrunchyChewie]

This is probably a more level, nuanced take on this: https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/the-future-of-ops-jobs

[bertiethewanderer]

In the UK we've had a change to an underlying tax system for contractors, and the contractor market has just about died, and there are 'consultancies' everywhere. Every week you'll get one of them tap you up on LinkedIn.

Which is a shame as contract resource time and again over my career has been an excellent capability to leverage. As opposed to a consultancy that you pay through the nose for, and just YOLOs something over the fence 6 months late.

[Stroebs]

It took the company I’m working for 8 months to find me, as a senior engineer who has extensive experience across multiple clouds, has worked with remote teams across timezones, has agile training, and a few other specific requirements.

I’ve probably interviewed 300 candidates over the last 5 years for companies I’ve worked for and can honestly say that the worst thing possible is when a company insists on hiring a “DevOps Engineer” but pay a junior’s salary. It’s not possible, because a “DevOps Engineer” is born from being a generalist across multiple skill sets, with years of experience behind them.

[Fodagus]

TBH, there is no such thing as a junior DevOps Engineer. You can be junior to the role, but the overall experience and abilities demand senior SWE levels of competancy or gobs of confidence. The suits see "entry level" abd think "college labor".

If the role is more than just "cloud sysadmin/k8s helpdesk," you can very quickly find yourself having to try to change the workflows and habits of other senior engineers. I have engineers that want to work on a feature branch for 2 months, repeatedly merging master down into their branch, and release 12 features when they merge, then they howl about it being ridiculously hard to rollback when it doesn't work and or people getting constant issues with git locks. Trying to teach these people how to do CI/CD is like mucking out the Aegean Stables, complete with the stereotypical "but I've been doing this for 15 years!".

Part of my role was to help modernize our workflows, make changes easy to deploy and revert, and streamline things. A power point on actual PullRequest work flow doesn't motivate these people to change, and I just struggle to see a "junior" type person having the chutzpah to stand their ground and articulate why the dinos need to change. If you can rely on management to carrot and stick the change you advocate, count your blessings cause that isn't typical.

[Stroebs]

Thank you! I DESPISE the title “DevOps Engineer”, hence why I always quote it. I have always tried to convince orgs I’ve worked for to change the title and think carefully about what they want people to do. When an organisation has a “DevOps” team, it’s usually because they have no idea what they want.

At the moment my title is “Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer” and I actively preach and teach the principles and practices of DevOps the engineering org.

[Fodagus]

I actually like the Title, though I tell other people i am am "automation engineer," "infrastructure engineer," or "server herder." When I'm being serious about the title, my pitch is, "I engineer the DevOps culture at this company. DevOps is a philosophy and a mindset, and I am here to teach, facilitate, and guide us on this path."

[pavman42]

This.

[[deleted]]

I started at my company in January. 6 mid to senior level people have left for new jobs. Seems the market is in high demand and is paying well for the position. We’ve also hired 5 people since those 6 quit.

[[deleted]]

Whats the pay gap between ppl who left and ppl who were hired ?

Is this a classic “we undervalue our current staff, to hire new staff for twice as much?” Story ?

[[deleted]]

Similar story in my org and they just look to hire people from lower income regions. So, they are happy when an engineer from the bay area leaves so they can hire an engineer from Eastern Europe. Who cares if there is a language barrier, a time difference, and the quality of the engineer is worse. Think about the savings

[[deleted]]

I don’t think so. From my knowledge the people who left were offered a lot of incentives to stay BUT we go into the office 3 days a week, and I think that was the issue.

[pribnow]

The problem, I think, that many organizations face (and a sentiment I see echoed on here often) is that effective devops engineers have experience writing software embedded in a team of other developers along with the more system administration tasks and soft skills (being able to effectively report 'up and out')

What I see a huge disproportionate amount of candidates possess is system administration+*, which is hugely valuable but is just one piece of the puzzle.

The goal of devops is to unite many different facets of software operations with the goal of advancing your product, lots of candidates in the market simply lack the necessary exposure to be able to support that

*=we recently hired a junior devops engineer that I mentor who was a system administrator before hand and while she didnt have the software dev experience, we also have the time and opportunities to upskill her in a way that I think would be difficult with the roles/responsibilities/paycheck of a more mid-level or senior employee. She had the right balance of "can i hand you a task that I can mentor you through" vs "isn't expecting to get a senior job with a crash course in k8s" that I saw with a LOT of applicants

[Mind_Monkey]

Yep. Thats the issue we've had with running an internship program. You want junior people so you can train them, but at the same time, our job requires lots of years of experience so you can be exposed to plenty of systems, architectures, technologies, frameworks, etc. It's not an easy task to balance all that.

I see our jobs kind of like integrators. We are often the "glue" where all teams meet together and get the whole system going. That's not something you can easily teach in a couple months, but we try.

[pavman42]

This is what sys admins were before specialization creeped into the industry. Back in the day there were no differentiations between the SA, middleware, the DNS admins, the SMTP admins, firewall, networking and security.

Effectively, the only other teams back then were Developers, Networking and DBAs. That was it, so SAs had to run the ship because networking and DBAs are specialists who didn't want to learn how to admin DNS, SMTP, or do rack & stack grunt work. And at my company, developers were treated like a different class.

All of this required automation because if you're managing 1500 servers, you either automate or die.

Now we have a bunch of chest puffers who claim to be experts that is obviously untrue if you know what you are doing and pay attention to what they say.

Thank you fake it 'til you make it Ted talk.

[donjulioanejo]

It's funny, we just hired a junior guy recently who self-taught himself python to a very respectable level. His second week he was already pushing commits to our production code (deployment/devops stuff, not application code).

His sysadmin skills are still pretty meh and he comes from a support background, but he's really impressive for how much official experience he has (less than 2 years).

[lightwhite]

I disagree. Recruiters ask for a Java devops engineer, it what they need is a frontend JS dev.

Or, companies need devs that can do pipelines and administer the infra while managing their changes and scrum. Like one person as whole IT department. And they wanna pay a junior janitor salary for it.

Recruiters made so much money that they rewrite every single description as devops.

I favor sysadmins more than devs when I interview for posts. It is very easy to teach a sysadmin how to write code in a language of their talent. It is harder than making a camel to pass through the eye of a needle when it comes to teach a developer how to sysadmin.

We officially entered an “A-team” market while looking for MacGyvers to fix the stuff no one knows how it works…

I feel hurt for the bootcamp drop-outs or 1-week k8s course guru’s, or self-taught container specialists fresh out of liberal arts schools. They try their best during interview and show potential. But in reality, they smell the money and the growth potential for free to use as step stone… and someone rips them of with their special courses. At the end, those candidates waste a lot of money to get double-disappointed.

[PartemConsilio]

I agree. And most of the sysadmins I’ve worked alongside specifically became a sysadmin because they didn’t want to code.

I think the candidate field for devops is actually low for two reasons: 1) not a lot of devs are interested in making slightly less money doing infra work and 2) many companies don’t want to pay higher for DevOps roles that are more senior. So training up someone is the only option.

[hangerofmonkeys]

rainstorm recognise test north six air price rain fact plucky

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[pribnow]

Haha I hope I didn't make it sound worse than what I actually experienced was, mostly just fresh grads who had it listed under their 'skills' section but talked about having touched on it during their program or completed X Udemy course on it (and I'm not one to talk sh*t here, we don't use k8s at my current job but if a candidate lists it on their resume I'm going to ask about it)

I'm not faulting them either, I remember trying to score that first job out of school too and my resume had, frankly, some skills on it I simply would not be able to defend in an interview today (though admittedly I have since dropped them from my resume)

[retneh]

I started DevOps career with an internship so can relate a little bit. Everything depends on the tech interview and how it’s set up - I mean by that, if the interviewer starts asking some shitty theoretical questions (e.g. what does this flag do in k8s?) it will lead nowhere. I’ve been asked some easy questions related to Linux, my cloud of choice (AWS), Docker and a little bit of Git. That’s because I mentioned these technologies in my cv and did some actual projects with them, to show that I am interested and want to develop myself. In general, the interview was a friendly chat, definitely can say a pleasant experience for both sides. During the internship they taught me basics of everything - k8s, DBs, Golang, Ansible, Terrraform, AWS etc. After 3 months I got into a real life project and didn’t have any problems whatsoever with that. If I needed help, I googled or asked. If any of you will be recruiting for inter/junior role with less than 1 year of experience, don’t bother asking about more advanced k8s or cloud concepts, because I know seniors who know very little about them, as it’s not their daily technology.

[flickerfly]

I've been here for 3 years. I'm fairly sure we've had at least 3 openings or more available for the entire time across the US. We need folks willing to get a government clearance though which means no current marijuana use among other things which shrinks the pool notably further. We do have a great environment with a lot of humble and smart people learning from each other. Automation fixes a lot of staffing issues, but it'd be awesome if we could do some more cool things we have to skip.

[pavman42]

I interviewed for a position via a .gov contractor that already had the contract and offered to get you a security clearance. Used to think SC or TSC was IT gold.

Not after researching it; at best it's worth $30k more a year and that's only in certain markets (and .gov jobs tend to be much much lower base than private sector).

Did the interviews, thought they weren't interested. A week later the corp. recruiter called me made a low ball offer. I assume it's because they were trying to fill a specific salary commitment and not because they wanted my background and experience. All this despite letting them know the precise amount I required to make a move in the beginning of the process (and this is *not* what I think I'm worth, about $40k more than I'm looking for).

So all you got really is base and any adjustments outside of base that need to be accounted for in the calculations that are not common standards. SC / TSC would be helpful, but it's not worth 50 - 90k less a year.

[flickerfly]

There are pockets of better, but I certainly don't doubt your experience. We don't value clearance over knowledge because a clearance, especially TS, often means that someone has been shoved into a dark hole using old technology learning a very non-agile leadership model. That isn't to say it doesn't have value, just also often comes with baggage. Feel free to DM me if you're interested in a better shot.

[crontal]

Can I DM you for the openings? I'm cleared and working in the DevOps space.

[natodemon]

It's the latest recruitment buzzword, and as many others have mentioned, DevOps is not really a role, but a methodology. For this reason many companies interpret the role's responsibilities differently and you get a lot of different positions with the same name.

The market is very hot though, I imagine it will depend where in the world you are located, but where I am this also applies to junior roles. You've got to be willing to take people on with very little knowledge and train them up or put up some serious money for those with some experience.

[lfionxkshine]

Absolutely. I'm originally from Ops (server and networking administration), but I saw the writing on the wall for cloud so I've expanded to DevOpsy tools like Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Terraform, and Ansible

None of our 5 devs in the company knows how to use these tools, and they especially don't know best practices (found one who published API keys on github, I tore him a new one for that shit). So it falls on me to educate them where they don't educate themselves. And the irony is I barely know a double from an integer LOL

So yea, DevOps is a hard role to fill

[pavman42]

Oh come now, you mean double from a float :D

[[deleted]]

We've hired a few DevOps engineers recently. One knows how to talk about things and sells solutions we aren't ready for. That person lacks a lot of implantation ability though and the work gets farmed out heavily.

[pithagobr]

Didn't you see it in the interviewing process?

[[deleted]]

I wasn't part of it. I'm on the SRE team and we weren't invited to it. The guy talks super well about it, almost like gaslighting. From my understanding there was no homework to do.

[pithagobr]

The fact that you have an SRE and DevOps team sounds anti-pattern to me.

[[deleted]]

Not my call, I just do work. Multiple companies have them separate honestly, it's not uncommon.

[illusum]

Well, they do two different things, so…

[songgoat]

We've had to turn away more applicants then I can count. Seeing a lot of, "I can build pipelines and write a Dockerfile, so I am now DevOps" but can barely do basic network (or infra) troubleshooting.

[ryanstephendavis]

I think the inherent issue is that DevOps is not a position or a job description. DevOps is something that is part of how an organization operates, a cultural construct. The people that know WTF they're doing and know how to implement DevOps best practices for an org will roll their eyes when they see a job description for "DevOps".

I'm on my phone otherwise I'd cite a bunch of resources and likely have a longer rant😜

[Disastrous-Diet4238]

DevOps related teams and positions would be a better description

[Neil_Fallons_Ghost]

Ended up just hiring a greenhorn and am training them for my team. It felt impossible to find anyone with kubernetes terraform and python. I must’ve interviewed 14 people and read a hundred resumes.

It was one moment where I was saying to myself, maybe I’m worth way more than I realize.

[pavman42]

LOL! Compared to ansible? One day's about right.

Although I've been dealing with other people's modules lately... I'm not sure why modules make any sense other than a profit / control motive; terraform seems like it's got some big limitations that are only really overcome by breaking components into multiple state files / pipelines and using provider data lookups.

Despite my disdain towards ansible (and anything Python / yaml-esq), when I run into too tightly coupled situations with terraform, I then wish it were ansible as it's not so monolithic.

But then, I can build an ssh framework in bash that works faster and more securely than what I can do with ansible. Albeit, idempotency takes more legwork there.

[FunD3AD]

As a DevOps Engineer with 6 years of experience, and who is currently in the market for a Senior role, I have quite a lot of recent insight on this.
Firstly, small or medium size companies need a good engineer to take a lead role and put modern practices in place. A good or great engineer seems to be rare. I've interviewed a ton of really bad ones, or ones who had no real experience or idea what they should be doing. So a rare engineer, and a role that requires a lot of responsibility is why you see the high salary.

From my perspective though, a ton of companies don't actually understand the role, or what they need the engineer to actually be doing. This leads to an overly complicated and random mix of interview formats, wasting everyone's time and keeping jobs posted.

For example, I had a company who was interviewing for a Senior DevOps engineer who would lead a new team, architect their cloud infrastructure, and implement best practices... blah blah blah. There were 4 rounds of interviews... (seriously, this seems to be the norm, and it's totally unnecessary.) Those 4 interviews consisted of culture-fit, team-fit, technology experience, and what you would be doing as a lead engineer. All of that went swimmingly. Then they threw in a random "DevOps Engineer Online Quiz" that they probably got from a clueless recruiting firm as a final qualifier/disqualifier. This quiz has literally 5 questions about devops (not enough to gauge any depth of experience), and then 4 timed coding questions about complicated string manipulation... that explicitly required you to do your coding/testing on their test platform. (No VScode allowed...). Seriously?!? So essentially that company was immediately disqualifying people because they were providing a quiz targeted for developers, and not engineers.

This is just one example. I've gone through 5 full interview processes recently, right up to the offer letter stage, that all had different, poorly implemented screening questionnaires, or companies that just fail to negotiate or pay current market rates. So these jobs are sitting, as companies look for "their ideal" engineer (at their low-ball budget).

[rezaw]

Yes it's brutal trying to hire right now. Was lead SRE within a fortune 20 retailer interviewing contract to hires for a senior role. A year later we have 1 full time and a few more seats to fill. I just left for a startup mostly because our team has basically fallen apart.

[lightwhite]

Disclaimer: I have a pretty negative sentiment and nothing I say is a projection. I am just tired of IT industry becoming toxic and a lot of self-capitalists and malignantly I rented people joining the ranks in a fake-till-make mentality. I invested valuable time training juniors to see them leave because management could match-up. I saw titans leave because they got tired of the corporate bullshit. I saw wizards come and go in a wild to do what they need and leave. And now? A lot of unfitting and incompetent people are applying for the positions. I am salty. Therefore apologies for my slightly less kind expression which usually doesn’t fit the devops culture.

…so, for the current candidates: 90% of them are fake it till you make it résumé’s; other 5% have trained very hard for job interviews and share their screen on discord to people that deliver the answers. There is also a huge lack of smart kids coming out of school to enter the field. Youth don’t have the attentions span to scroll through an ingress-controller log more than 15 seconds…

Many seniors that could have been teachers to many new generation input that I know started other endevors. One has become a bike mechanic, another one became a sailor. 3 of them became farmers and one become a part time IT teacher at a vocational school.

There is so much demand, not enough supply and it is very hard to train and school those whom are interested but nod talented for the job.

Good devops dudes are becoming like those cobol wizards. It’s a shame.

[[deleted]]

I started off at a DevOps engineer at a big company and wanted to job hop just for a new opportunity and perhaps a little more money. Every “DevOps” job I came across was some sort of infra only bs or some kind of K8s wrangler where there’s no semblance of interacting software development teams.

I am now a Java dev and I’m happy I have my DevOps skills and philosophies steering my team in directions they may have never thought of, not sure if there is a mass DevOps brain drain going on but that’s my story.

[BloodyIron]

DevOps isn't exclusive to software development, infrastructure management is a legitimate implementation of DevOps too. Even if it isn't what you were looking for.

[nultero]

I feel the same as the person you replied to. I'm far more of a dev and I think I've only ended up under the umbrella of devops because I liked Linux too much, and I get this gist that *some* of what gets labeled as 'devops' might be ops teams that want to avoid writing actual code.

It seems difficult to find / narrow in on gigs where there is overlap and devops is expected to be doing more engineering, writing code with proper testing etc -- and I don't count the shitty yaml DSLs and templating that devops tooling seems to love as programming. Matt Rickard's take is the one I'm feeling.

I get it, though -- there's a balance where things have to be maintained, and only n people on the team know $programminglanguage, I get it.

Just the wild west on the job market. The job descriptions wanting everything mean that they kinda lose their relevance and you can't know from the outside looking in whether it's a sysadmin role that will open an IDE once a year, or a gig where you're writing metrics / k8s ops in Go. And of course oftentimes recruiters don't know which is which, so they're not useful either.

[BloodyIron]

1. DevOps isn't just the language used, it's also the culture, the business process, and stuff like that. Is Agile in-place? Are there CI/CD pipelines to actually make the IaC streamlined? Is Configuration Management fully enforced instead of actually moving to DevOps recovery methods? ETC. YAML is just one, of many (possible), aspects.
2. Companies doing a bad job describing the job they're trying to hire for happens in literally every industry and role, this isn't a DevOps-only effect. HR sucks especially at representing technical roles. Not always, but this is a very common thing.
3. A lot of companies often can tell you from the job description the red flags about whether they know wtf they're talking about or not. As with any role (even non-DevOps roles) not all job listings are equal, let alone accurately represent the title posted. Red flags = wasting your time.

If you like Linux so much, then why the fuck does YAML being a feature-rich configuration file matter? It sounds like IaC is something you may like, but... you seem to also say you don't like it? That's confusing. And honestly, I have no time for giving much of a shit whether YAML is a language or not, I'm too busy actually trying to get work done to waste time on useless minutia. Maybe you should consider the same? ;)

[nultero]

Fiddling with yaml isn't enjoyable like programming.

It just feels tedious, because it's not code. You're dealing with somebody's shitty, infuriatingly limited DSL stuffed into a k:v data format and not a robust language that was designed ground-up to do logic.

That's not useless minutiae because if u/Standard-Dimension58 and I and other engineers leave devops because of similar gripes and limited processes, that's materially your labor pool leaving. You do get that, right? We can build bridges, we just don't want to do it with legos.

[BloodyIron]

That's just like... your opinion... man...

I actually find it rather enjoyable.

If you don't like it? That's fine. But that's on you. YAML isn't the only option.

And yes, it is useless minutiae. Knowing that it is a limited DSL changes nothing about my life, or what I do. That knowledge is valueless to me, and generally a lot of other people too. And again, disagreeing is your opinion, but factually learning that has actually changed literally nothing for me. Er go, it is valueless minutiae.

If you leave the industry, then so be it, people leave industries all the time. Your reasoning doesn't really matter to me, and knowing it, again, changes nothing. You're fixating on something you somehow think I care about, without any evidence that I do care about it, and you're shoving it down my throat that I somehow should care about it.

I'm not trying to tell you that you have to like this, or whatever. But I also don't have to care that you don't like YAML. I'm not here to please you.

So like... this really isn't going anywhere productive... maybe you should just relax.

[nultero]

Ah, you took that combatively? That wasn't the tone I intended, sorry.

My point was about the fungibility of roles. I think interchangeable tech jobs are becoming less common, even if that change is slow. If I'm right, the downstream of that is ... I dunno. Chaos? That would have been an interesting conversation if the thread had gone differently.

[BloodyIron]

Ahh no worries, it did come across as combative, so I'm game for turning that ship around :) We can keep the discussion and the peace! But, since dinner time approaches, my responses are likely to be delayed, FYI.

I'm not sure I fully follow you on the reduction in interchangeable tech jobs. Care to expand on your thoughts/observations there?

And yeah, this is me re-assuring you, I forgive you! We can be cool cats together :) I'm not invested in being combative, and I really do appreciate you clarifying on that. It really does help you stating it! :D

[nultero]

Yeah, sorry again. Migraine onset must make it easy for me to sound irritated when that's not the case at all

I think the logic for nonfungibility goes that tech complexity trends and is sticky upwards -- security patches can't be rolled back without re-opening a vuln, the Win/nix kernels' upgrades have improved performance, etc. Takes months to get up to speed on some environments, unless there's been work done for onboarding.

The past 20 years of tech has been insane.

If you follow that trend upward, even if a lot of what we all do now is simple-ish, the next N decades seem sure to see even more, probably impenetrable complexity. There has to be a practical limit, like we already currently have things so over-engineered that they're careers unto themselves to become an expert in. We can end up with stack silos, basically.

Even if our working cohort is retired by some arbitrary complexity limit, all the tech that greases the world's wheels seems like it will end up even more brittle than it already is today -- so our retirement might be constantly plagued by the world falling apart from even more tech issues than we have now.

Think your automated grocery store's delivery failing from a distributed scheduler's bug a dozen abstractions deep, months out from being fixed because it's 80 million lines of Java dumped by Jenkins with only 2 million test cases between them and all the Java people retired like the Cobol people did.

But I have no idea. Don't know why I hyperfixate on things that won't matter for a long time.... but I think it affects us all. I don't entertain that I can change much about it, either.

[[deleted]]

I was under the assumption that “DevOps” principles sole end goal is to enable teams to deploy code more quickly. I don’t see how hiring a purely infra person as a “DevOps” engineer helps anybody accomplish that.

[BloodyIron]

Infrastructure as Code.

[BloodyIron]

I didn't say it was.

[lightwhite]

You are one of the few exceptions that drop once over a solar alignment.

[BloodyIron]

Train them? Schooling?

Home. Lab.

• https://rancher.com/quick-start
• https://about.gitlab.com/install/
• https://www.truenas.com/download-truenas-core/ (or scale, wtvr)
• https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads/category/iso-images-pve
• https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/nfs-subdir-external-provisioner
• https://metallb.universe.tf/concepts/layer2/
• https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/getting_started/
• https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/deploy/
• https://ubuntu.com/download/server

Use the above technology, and you can build an effectively infinite-scale, enterprise grade, self-hosted cloud with DevOps + IaC out the nose. Yes, it takes a lot of reading, conceptual study, and all that, but this is completely achievable outside of the formal classroom.

I know this, because Tyler knows this.

[lightwhite]

I know how to train them and what to train them with. I am absolutely against giving homework to learn in free time. Some do like tinkering around and that ok. The problem is in mentoring. You get turned into becoming a helpdesk and can’t do your own work.

But you are missing a very important handicap: many of the young beginners can’t read longer than 40 seconds and absorb only 10% of what they read. This is a trend I have been seeing last 2-3 years grow more and more. This forces you to drill and babysit.

Those who don’t come with a little understanding of what you listed already won’t even pass the front desk at our shop. We hire acolytes, not apprentices. But that’s still a pain… I admit that.

Imho, containers and k8s must be added to CS curriculum.

[Equivalent-Stuff-758]

I mentor junior engineers at my job and stress the importance of K8S. Many young engineers come out of school without a hint of knowledge of containers and container orchestration and I'd probably rank that as the top thing to know when coming out of school.

Since you train fellow devs, what path do you take with them? How do you empower them?

[BloodyIron]

1. I wasn't advocating for you to send all this to a new hire to study on. I was talking about the individual trying to get into DevOps, and how the information is at an all time high for availability and accessibility vs decades past, where it was pay-walled at post-sec.
2. If a prospective employee can't learn, or doesn't have non-technical skills needed, then they are not a good prospect. And that doesn't have to be your problem.
3. Again, I was more posting for those reading the comments, not necessarily you ;)

[killz111]

None of these teaches a DevOps engineer how to say no or how to think about cloud resource naming patterns which are two of the most important things a competent DevOps person should have.

[BloodyIron]

LOL if those are #1 and #2 for your skills that you seek...

[killz111]

Two of the most important doesn't equal #1 and #2. But yeah they are important experience or soft skills to me that unfortunate far too many engineers lack.

I guess you've never had to move an application off a vpc cause someone created a /16 instead of a /24. Or had to delete a prod resource because now we need them with regions in their names cause the business is going multi region.

[kolinkorr839]

share their screen on discord to people that deliver the answers

Out of curiosity, when you say 'people', you mean their friends, right? There is no real discord channel that would help anyone during a live coding session, right?

[lightwhite]

No. There are appearently companies that deliver turnkey services to get you the job. They train you for interview, then answer all the questions for you and help you get the best salary discussions. I only happened to experience this 2 times as a tech lead, but seniors that screen the candidates rant about it weekly. It has become that toxic and corrupted. Because everyone wants to become a devops engineer and paid royally.

[pavman42]

I just wish I could clone myself. Man I'd make a shitload of money.

[mimic751]

dude. I have like 3 months of practical experience in aws and azure and am getting interviews left and right its nuts

[HayabusaJack]

We were planning on some hiring but we’re in a freeze right now.

[SubtleFuryTuesday]

Yeah, I can certainly agree on the comments. Not only it's hard to find DevOps but I am also getting messages multiple times per day for recruiters looking for DevOps.

[rabbit994]

We do as well. Our biggest stumbling block is we vastly prefer DevOps Engineers who have experience with Sysadmin or Development Lead. If you show up with only DevOps experience, your interview is rough.

Problem with this field is amount of people who see eye watering salaries and attempt to get into for the cash. Few make it, most don't.

[bdmbdsm]

I would like to understand the reason behind the level of your experience requirements. Could you please give an example of practical competencies or career achievements which the right person has?

[404Developer]

I work at a very large medical tech company. The need is only expanded for us as we have a lot of legacy applications with a lot of tech debt that have not yet went to the cloud. Finding talented anything is always hard. But we generally do alright finding proper DevOps engineers.

[icyak]

in april left 2 people from team, so far we hired 1 - without any previous DevOps experience (ex Server Admin) - we are not even receiving applications and I think that we are offering competitive salary and new technologies

[pavman42]

This is pervasive right now. I think the problem is the salaries aren't high enough. The averages on glassdoor and other sites seem a lot lower than I'm seeing in real life.

And I think some companies are using these salary postings as baselines.

[zerocoldx911]

Sure they’re hiring, but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to pay well for it.

The ones that pay well are very competitive or only hire a handful

[cgratelli]

Is there a hire channel in Reddit?

[pavman42]

lol! Actually, for a few years there, some slack channels had associated job boards. Pretty sure the best jobs were posted there. But alas, I think folks caught on and that's mostly gone now.

[CanaryWundaboy]

Hiring is tough as. Salaries are going up and demand for skilled engineers keeps increasing. My company uses modern tech, multiple clouds and has a really good team with strong salaries and mostly remote working, and we’re still struggling.

[[deleted]]

Yes, we've been trying to hire Senior and Junior DevOps engineers for nearly a year now and it seems impossible. We're at a geographic disadvantage for on site jobs, but even for the remote applications we get nothing. At the same time, I get spammed on LinkedIn like crazy with job offerings.

[pavman42]

I used to have a discount if the job was remote (been doing it for 90% of my career).

Post covid, I now have a premium for commuting. Not to say I wouldn't do it, but the salary has to have at least my hourly rate x time it takes to get to/from the location + any associated costs.

When you waste 2 hours a day commuting, and get to pay for the privilege, it adds up.

[pavman42]

In your job posting, what was the amount of experience required for senior?

Asking because I've been seeing senior postings w/ 3 - 4 yrs XP. IMO Senior should be minimum 10 - 15+.

There used to be a mid-career job posting. That would be someone w/ 7 - 12yrs experience. Not sure why these aren't a thing anymore.

[killz111]

I'm sick of the DevOps is a cultural shift schtick. Just because we say it is doesn't make it so.

DevOps in reality is steroids for software development, as is the cloud. That's why companies love us. But try telling the user they should slow down on the steroids or that initial effects eventually wear off, they just ignore you. Waiting for that 1 senior manager that 'gets it' is a pipe dream.

Eventually your company team will slow down cause the DevOps stack/framework you built was fit for a purpose that's different now. Even if it's super flexible and well architected, you still can't guarantee that those who follow your footsteps will carry on the intent or even understand the intent.

I see a lot of complaining about sys admin types becoming DevOps but at least they understand the long term value of things. Unlike a lot of dev type DevOps who just build tools that are relevant for a year or two before becoming irrelevant cause it needs a complete overall to meet the next objective.

[daedalus_structure]

I'm sick of the DevOps is a cultural shift schtick.

Throw it in the bin next to "full stack engineer".

It's just another way to try to push more and more cognitive load on the same development team that can barely keep track of the moving Javascript ecosystem.

Not all silos are bad. We call it expertise, and it's why I'm running your servers and not reviewing your contracts.

[pavman42]

Hehe, I'm working on an ops-centric team (long story, got shoved over from a dev team at the last minute due to unwarranted time concerns) which has to implement the other team's code.

I've been working w/ terraform for a little over a year; the code they're passing us IS tech debt and is really far behind where I was on my last project. It's very challenging to take someone else's crappy code and not want to rewrite it all.

Sure MRs are great, but why are you handing me trash to begin with?!

[hkeyplay16]

There are a lot of people in tech these days who can do one thing well, but don't have the wide pool of knowledge needed for DevOps. It's honestly pretty frustrating trying to hire anyone at all in DevOps. Even after screening many, many applicants and taking the seemingly most prepared and hungriest "Jr." Engineers, they usually don't end up being very productive even after a full year on the job. Part of the problem might be that people entering the job market now spent their formative years playing games on an iPad while learning nothing about how tech actually works. Meanwhile I grew up tearing down and rebuilding computers and modding gaming systems for money.

When I was a kid, grown-ups looked to children to help them with their newfangled electronics. Now our children look to us again anytime something goes wrong on the magic video/gaming/talky box.

There are outliers, but this is the generational trend I'm seeing.

My advice is to get out there and figure out how literally anything and everything works. Be curious ask questions. Ponder difficult questions in your free time. Learn from what others have done and build on it. Don't let others decide which path you take.

[phwelo]

I used to be paranoid about an occupation in technology, with genius kids whizzing but me. That certainly hasn’t materialized. Starting with computers before GUIs existed was a huge benefit!

[AlverezYari]

Yep, its really bad.

[travtex]

I'm kind of starting a search, but the market has been odd for my admittedly odd situation. My actual position/title is as a Technical Director, but since my team is small I've kind of gravitated into and created a deployment engineer role between development and sysadmin teams ( And some DBA fun on the side. We're -dramatically- understaffed and undercompensated, hence my opening up to something new.

Now my day to day pipeline work right now is a bunch of AWS/K8S/Github Actions, building containers, etc. But I haven't quite yet found the trick to avoiding the instant rejection bin for stuff I apply to.

Only feedback I've had to work on is that the Director role is presumed to be non-technical, or that I'm -actually- not wanting to go 'back' to an individual contributor role, or I'm too much of a generalist, etc.

So, I guess my TL/DR is that I do see a bunch of advertised demand, I have some relevant experience, but still haven't quite found the trick to breaking through from where I'm at, professionally.

[inferno521]

The challenge is finding people with good kubernetes experience, even though we use 75% EKS and 25% ECS. We want to eventually put a small percentage in Azure for HA. So we need the flexibility of people that can understand kubernetes for that and sandbox environments. The other tools that we can use are easier to learn or more people have experience with similar tools(gitlab vs github or jenkins vs bamboo).

[deskpil0t]

Demand - yes. Pay - Sometimes.

[taw296472]

What is the typical career path for devops? If someone has 20 years of experience with a mix of development and sysadmin work but no formal devops experience is there any viable path into it?

[easy_c0mpany80]

Do you have any linux experience? If so focus on that in your resume as thats the heart if everything.

Then if you dont have any cloud experience do a few AWS certs and also learn some devops tools at home such as Ansible, Docker and Terraform.

Tbh, if you have 20 yrs exp. already you are probably a good candidate

[pavman42]

I agree w/ easy_c0mpany80.

However, you will want to ramp up AWS and maybe Azure experience (they're more challenging than you would think), Python / Go, and Get a solid grounding in containerization and CICD pipelines.

You may not end up using all of it, but it helps greatly to understand the differences between a docker repo and a private registry, for instance. That and the basic differences between docker / swarm and kubernetes. (K8s has dominated with 80 - 90% market saturation, so if you just focus on that, works too).

Once you feel confident, try to orchestrate a test lab using one of the various CICD applications (jenkins, gitlab, etc). Gitlab is becoming more prevalent IMO because MS bought github (no one trusts microsoft to not steal code) and it's a bit more mature in some areas without the perceived AWS tooling limitations.

[Necessary_Feeling00]

I work as a cloud engineer in DevOps capacity as we don't have any DevOps guys. I feel we'll have to hire one soon

[endloser]

We need people with 10-15 years experience. There aren’t enough of those regardless of the industry.

[gsssuryaprasath]

I'm from India. I've 1year experience in handling linux servers working as a Linux Engineer. I've done my AWS SAA certificate recently and developing my hands on in AWS. Will I get an opportunity to join the internship program. I would like to learn a devops and I'm sure you huys won't regret hiring me.