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Why nobody grows up wanting to be a DevOps engineer

Jake Page on May 20, 2024

When I look at younger generations that didn’t grow up largely offline like I did, I feel slightly sorry for them. I’m in my mid-thirties, so I kno...
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Kuberdenis

Oh my... this is such a good post. A topic I've been discussing with every single person that told me they "want to work with computers".

Low bar for entrance, huge number of opportunities, large number of technologies to learn / work with, good compensation... and more.

I've been a DevOps (Sr. DevOps & Lead now) for 5 years and in the 5 years of tinkering I managed to be part of so many areas of CS:

  • Infrastructure (on-prem and cloud)
  • Code (JS/TS, Python, Go, C#, jsonnet, and probably more...)
  • Databases (Relational, Non-Relational, Cache)
  • Management
  • Architecture
  • Sales

If I have to touch up on every little thing I had actively been a part of during many projects, the list would feel "unreal". But that is the essence of being a tinkerer (and in my opinion too - DevOps) - you get to do it all.

And the best part of it is I got into DevOps from System Administration (which is arguably now called Site Reliability Engineering). No long interviews, no portfolios, nothing too special other than a mobile game in Unity which I coded in school with a few Youtube videos, and a few Udemy certificates.

I don't even know how to express how I feel about this post. This is honestly the best piece of written content I've read the past year or so.

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Jake Page

Yeah mate, I can tell that you are the type of person I've had the luck of working with in the past. The genuine curiosity of knowing how things work and how they can work better is infectious and embodies the spirit of a deadly DevOps engineer. Thanks for the feedback @kubeden

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Jan Küster

As a software engineer who is doing DevOps occasionally I can only say that building a docker container behind a proxy is a total nightmare. Mostly because there are thousand possible causes for why things don't work and you spend hours of researching documentation just in order to find this very one correct settings that work for your specific setup.

Plus: many resources are outdated or refer to a different system stack (systemd vs vsysinit) or network configuration and as a non-admin this is so much waste of time....

The good thing though: once it's working and you got your deployment down to a "single step deployment" process it's party time for all involved

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Felipe Matheus de Souza Santos

This might sound rough, but, I always thought that any tech job is the kind of job that you just take after you are already grown and whatever dream you had as a kid is not reachable anymore.

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Giles Knap

Not for me. I discovered programming in 1977 and still absolutely freakin love it. Just been getting into platform engineering last few years.

I also enjoyed the positive and inquisitive post.

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Jake Page

Super happy to hear you are still so stoked!

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srikanth597 • Edited

Great post, I really find myself in the post.
The curiosity & knowing how it works & figuring out how to customise to the complex problem that one might have & its adoption, an endless ocean.
With the knowledge in the play across wide variety of different aspects becomes unique Engineers.
I call myself be a Software Engineer & thrown into any problem & shouldn’t be limiting myself particular aspects of software engineering problems & not just limiting to few infra automations.

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Thomas Wink

Well written and to the point. As an ex-DevOps guy I recognise most of what you are describing here, and just had to chuckle when reading the reddit replies :D

Personally, I think DevOps will be automated pretty soon. Apart from the boredom I experienced, this is the reason I got out.

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Jake Page

Thanks for that mate. I also think it's a matter of time, the only thing is that my estimate of "pretty soon" is still a long way away.

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Thomas Wink

I really hope so.

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Juraj

Realy enjoyed this piece!

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Jake Page

Many thanks @karadza !

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Piccolo Goku • Edited

For me it was: Systems administrator -> Infrastructure engineer -> DevOps engineer -> Platform engineering. Essentially your goals are pretty much the same, title and practices to achieve those goals changes.

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Tech Tobé

I really enjoyed some aspects of the perspective presented here. For me it was showed interest in games dev -> chose web dev -> showed interest in Site Engineer -> chose Devops Engineer 😂😂 I went through quite a bit of changes, but I think I just like learning & helping people learn. Generalist is literally what I aspired to be 🤝So now I'm into teaching people about what I've learned along my journey. They seem to appreciate me 😂👍 Great read!

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Jake Page

Keep it up Tobé, I'm also a huge advocate of teaching what you have learned as you continue learning yourself. Teaching in many ways helps you internalise the very ideas you are passing on. Thanks for the comment :)

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Allwell

This was an interesting and exciting read for me, as a newcomer to the DevOps space. Learning and understanding the history of DevOps, as you alluded to, is the key to building innovative solutions that evolve 2009 DevOps—the first movement, and the movement with its tools and software we know and use today—practices into Second Wave DevOps.

Thank you for sharing.

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Jake Page

Thank you mate!

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Skiamakhos • Edited

In my case I fell into app support & ops, but I'm not sure if we'll ever really get to DevOps as such. The pipelines are too slow with too many repeated checks and so many points of human interaction, where there's too much scope for human error, to be able to do multiple deployments every day. 2 per week, maybe.

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Sean Allin Newell

What do you mean? Hasn't the work gotten easier witj better tools? For example a startup in the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s with 2-3 founding engineers need drastically different skills. Imagine being one of 3 at the turn of the century - far more linux/ssh/network involved - compared to 2024 where we can get a VPS or a containerized solution with a custom and free ssl cert up in a day.

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Jake Page

+1

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Sebastian Fritsch

I wanted to be Frontend Developer because I love creating designs in a more complicated way 🌈 but then I needed to learn DevOps which was actually the best decision in my life, I luv it and I'm one of those who crave for new tech to deploy or handle code. Here I list Top 10 Exciting Tools for DevOps in 2024 🔥

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Jake Page

Hey @sfritsch09 thanks for sharing the link to you posts, I didn't know about some of those projects, super interesting.

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Patrick Livbom

Sorry for being a bit of a pain here but... i realized my previous comment on your article was made with a weird temporary account since i forgot i already had an account here :)
Happy if you delete it (user_d5f8f0c8f8)

Got thrown i n to DevOps from taking a job where someone should be mentoring and such for a few months since i was totally blank regarding Azure and Azure Devops, Team City and such... The new Colleauge went home on long term sick leave after maybe 6-7 days, so i just came to work the second week or so and "i´m gonna press this button and see if it helps... and then maybe this one... Hey, Where is the real IIS, this is merely a webpage with tabs upon it, is it hidden somewhere... " lol

I have been writing code (.net c# for most of the time) since 1997, and last few years at my previous workplace the table turned more and more towards maintenance and deployments of webs, EPi, SQL and Oracle maintenance and so on but that said, all On-Prem with Win based systems...

It has been a wild ride the last two or so years - wearing out google and chat GPT for "Best Practises YAML, Self Hosted Build Agents Linux and so on... but i am starting to feel quite comfortable being the allmighty with the deploy powers at work, messing the developers testresults up, contsantly delivering new pipelines with more cool features, yell at people for not using correct tagging or branching in git and everything else ;-)

Once again, great article, thank you for sharing

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Jake Page

Thanks a million @aikidokan super interesting start you DevOps you have there. Super happy that you are getting close to that sweat spot. hahah and I'm happy someone out there is yelling about tagging, seems trivial but proper tagging makes such a huge difference. Fair play to you Patrick!

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Swapnil Gupta

Loved reading this

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Philip Miglinci

The only thing that is cooler than working as a DevOps is creating an Open Source Developer Tool (Glasskube) for DevOps! :-)

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Jake Page

Hard to disagree!

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vincanger

But I want to be a devops engineer now

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Steeve

Wow, It's been a long time since I didn't read such a good article, congrats @jakepage91 !

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Jake Page

Thanks so much for the kind words mate!

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Martin Baun

Love how you wrote this!!

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Jake Page

Appreciate it @martinbaun

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Stephen Lester

Great article

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Jake Page

Thank you kindly!

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shashank

Nice Read!

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Martin Cronje

I think I might be going into dev ops.

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user_d5f8f0c8f8 profile image
user_d5f8f0c8f8 • Edited

Great article, enjoyed it very much :)
Got thrown i n to DevOps from taking a job where someone should be mentoring and such for a few months since i was totally blank regarding Azure and Azure Devops, Team City and such... The new Colleauge went home on long term sick leave after maybe 6-7 days, so i just came to work the second week or so and "i´m gonna press this button and see if it helps... and then maybe this one... - Where is the real IIS, is it hidden.... " lol
I have been writing code (.net c# for most of the time) since 1997, and last few years at my previous workplace the table turned more and more towards maintenance and deployments of webs, EPi, SQL and Oracle maintenance and so on but that said, all On-Prem with Win based systems...

It has been a wild ride the last two or so years - wearing out google and chat GPT for "Best Practises YAML, Self Hosted Build Agents Linux and so on... but i am starting to feel quite comfortable being the allmighty with the deploy powers at work, messing the developers testresults up, contsantly delivering new pipelines with more cool features, yell at people for not using correct tagging or branching in git and everything else ;-)
Once again, great article, thank you for sharing

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Martin Häusler

Whenever I hear DevOps I can't help but feel that it's a term invented by managers to reduce the number of people required to build and run software. No need for operations people if the devs run it themselves! It puts more pressure on the developers and even further increases the required skill set. Just look at the job offerings out there - the required skills read like the companies are looking for entire IT departments, not individual people. Yeah sure I can create a docker image that runs my program, deploy it on the cloud and fine-tune it, but do I want to spend my time doing that? Does the company want to pay a senior dev salary for me to do this? I don't know... I still feel that dev and ops are fundamentally different skill sets that should be done by different people.

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Mangai Ram

This post explores the reasons why DevOps isn't a common career aspiration and delves into the history of DevOps.

It examines the skills and mindsets required to be successful in this field and ponders the future of DevOps practices.

Overall, the post offers a thoughtful analysis of the DevOps landscape, past, present, and future. The following post explain How Learning Devops Course helpful for Automation Engineer.

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Scholarships Form

I recently found much useful information on your website, especially this blog page. Among the lots of comments on your articles. Thanks for sharing.
10th Pass Scholarship
RIT

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Kudzai Murimi

Well-documented

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Jitendra Choudhary

Loved reading this

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anythingwithawire

In the control systems world this is called Systems Integrator

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Reckless

People wants to be Google, Facebook user. Not work for Google, Facebook user.

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cvcasedo

Good read. I'm just curious how you got your data bec you got it spot on! You got me with the 3D Printer and Glue reference. Great work Jake! 👏

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Jake Page

Research-wise, I consume a good amount of DevOps related blogs and podcasts.
To be honest the main idea for the blog post came from this Arrested DevOps podcast episode I listened to a few months ago: arresteddevops.com/the-new-devops/

Interacting and learning from people's experiences on Reddit I find super valuable also.

Other valuable resources are:

Thanks for the comment mate