For All Wanting To Enter Devops, Here's My Personal "stand Out" Tips

Hello all,

Do-everything developer of ~20 years who transitioned into DevOps 5 years ago reporting in - born from the struggles with my own current team members and the vast majority of DevOps candidates we interview, I wanted to share my thoughts about the industry and candidates we come across:

• 95% of good DevOps engineers were developers first - there are exceptions, but being a DevOps Engineer is knowing the pain your devs face and most importantly improving it.

-- If you weren't a dev first, that's fine, but you MUST to be open and receptive to your developer staff and their pains.

If you neglect the above you will never succeed en masse - the dev staff won't rate you, you won't have a constant source of inspiration for things to improve, and largely you won't amass respect.

• Leaping from SysAdmin => DevOps is 1000x more difficult to pull off than Dev => DevOps - not impossible, but non-developers in my experience largely do not/will not learn the fundamental good code-writing practices that all devs will learn on day one.

edit: the above is not a golden, legal rule, just my on-average observation :)

The number of candidates we reject each month that think doing "AZ101" certifications or telling me how much their Golang/Rust stack "could" scale is indescribable - not unimportant having that skillset, but if you operate in a DevOps team just working with brand-new stacks and technologies each day and pay no attention to the business-process pain your staff base is dealing with, you won't last.

• Please, please learn the basics of computer hardware, networking (IPv4/IPv6, DNS, DHCP) outside of a cloud environment - the number of people who claim experience with these but falter as soon as it's not "in an AWS VPC" is unbelievable.

• Be hungry to learn, forever, always. - if you're not one of the most technically-innovative people in your company, and at least somewhat interested in tech/dev outside of work, you will fail - and you should. DevOps is not a role for people to do average and milk it for what it's worth.

At the risk of sounding like a bitter veteran with the above - these are just my own experiences and guidance I would give to new entrants to the industry if I could :)

Bitterness aside - if you really "give a shit" about learning and innovation, my top tips are as follows:

• Innovate and develop new strategies or approaches as a primary goal - you will come across 40-50 year old employees that are bitter about your success and innovation, give them no reasons to have a point, let your good work speak for itself.

• Don't work for any company that you would be worried about spotting a mistake and owning up to it - I'm fortunate where I work that we foster and encourage a "see it, say something" culture and do not tolerate blame culture aside from intentional negligence - you will learn the most working in this kind of environment.

• Don't be afraid to propose huge changes to 20 year old business processes - the amount of stupid bullshit companies will follow for years on end without questioning is endless - chances are if you're a DevOps Engineer and think you've found a novel solution to something, you're very probably right.

• Stay humble and keep close with any engineers/dev staff that you service or look after - these folks are your bread and butter - the second you lose touch with them, you lose your technical sway and influence - and your own sense of "what needs to be improved".