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Some advice I would give to a junior DevOps Engineer

by donutshop on 10/20/23, 1:24 PM with 52 comments

  • by spicyusername on 10/20/23, 1:49 PM

        DevOps is not a role, but a culture inside an organization
    I think we need to give up on fighting this fight. The thousands upon thousands of job postings with that job title clearly indicate otherwise.

    Better to accept that the philosophical battle has been lost and that DevOps Engineer is the new name for other titles like "System Administrator", "Infrastructure Engineer", "Operations Engineer", or "Site Reliability Engineer".

    e.g. "The person responsible for dealing with making sure there is a way for the software to run somewhere and that it stays running."

  • by donutshop on 10/20/23, 1:31 PM

    I don't agree with this generalization for good communication "In my experience more extroverted and “chaty” engineers have it better on average."

    Often times we conflate loud communication with good communication. In my personal experience there are lots of verbose individuals that are poor communicators.

  • by nineteen999 on 10/20/23, 1:41 PM

    None of those skills listed are any more "DevOps" than they are systems administrator, systems programmer, embedded programmer etc.

  • by JohnMakin on 10/20/23, 3:01 PM

    I disagree that there is no place for a junior role. I can spec out tons of projects a reasonably junior person could handle that would take away a lot of "busy" work for me. The problem is this - very few people actively choose DevOps. I've heard it said that DevOps (I started calling it just "ops" because many devops jobs have very little dev) isn't something someone chooses, it's something that just happens to you. For me, one minute I'm volunteering to help out with the builds at a small startup, blink and then 5 years later I'm a DevOps engineer.

    I would give juniors this advice:

    Do not pigeonhole yourself into a particular role. The best "DevOps" I've seen are generalists that can fit in on SRE, Systems/platform engineering, network, security types of teams, etc. Same goes with technology. If you find yourself early on spending 2 years working on nothing but Jenkins and CI/CD pipelines, guess what your next job is gonna be about. Challenge yourself, always be learning a new thing. If you don't like learning, or can't learn fast, this isn't the job for you. If you don't like potentially brutal on-call schedules, this isn't the job for you. If you don't like mostly thankless work that is invisible if you are doing it correctly, this isn't the job for you. Also look at job postings frequently and see what companies are asking for proficiency in and make sure you at least are somewhat competent in those areas.

    Also I wish more DevOps had more of a CS background. I can't tell you how many times I've seen multiple senior DevOps looking at a machine that is clearly and very obviously thrashing and have no idea what they're looking at.

  • by BeastMachine on 10/20/23, 2:30 PM

    One additional one I would add is: don't be an ass. I have seen a fair share of people in this role belittle QA, Devs, and interns because they're not able to follow along or understand how to use DevOps tooling.

    I like to think of the role as hospitality; you don't particularly have to like the guest but try to create a good working atmosphere.

    A specific example: if a particular dev runs to you every time a build fails and tries to blame the environment: force them to check their own work first. If there's another branch that builds, ask if it's related to one of the changes in this branch. Ask if the code builds locally. Ask them what they've tried so far to debug the issue. These questions will help out anyone who does not know how to actually troubleshoot build failures and discourage anyone who is simply trying to pawn off their work.

  • by orwin on 10/20/23, 2:51 PM

    The last one, Focus, is very import. At school, I had time to think and work on two or three different stuff. When I was a junior 'developper' (basically I was developing filters to clean data to feed it to an OCR), I continued doing 2-3 different part at the same time. And then I kept doing it as a devops. This was a mistake. As a devops, you really have to be focused on your subject, you can't afford to half-ass your projects, and the scope is so large you will always forget important details if you continuously jump from project to project. Keep focus, takes notes (temporary or in comments). And communicate. The rest is easy

  • by waffletower on 10/20/23, 3:00 PM

    DRY. Don't contribute to shrapnel infrastructure architecture -- consolidate configuration. Build effective abstractions as an organization. Use terraform only where you have to and use better abstractions everywhere else.

  • by markus_zhang on 10/20/23, 3:10 PM

    Ah, but it is so difficult to stay focus with all kinds of shit blown up and getting pinged in 10 channels. This is one skill that the military people are super good at.

  • by Always42 on 10/20/23, 2:46 PM

    after "DevOps is not a role, but a culture inside an organization" and "If we’re going to use it as a role, it’s not an entry level role"

    I left.

  • by zabzonk on 10/20/23, 2:10 PM

    Could we get rid of this "junior/senior" crap? I have never worked anywhere it was ever useful. You are a programmer - that's it. The only people that think otherwise are self-agrandising so-called "seniors".