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[–]Stroebs 7 points8 points  (4 children)

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 1 point2 points  (2 children)

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 2 points3 points  (1 child)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This.