The Harsh Reality of Being a DevOps Engineer

As always, the problem seems to be management and bad company practices

I've been studiyng Devops tools for some months now, can you please point me in the direction to apply for remote internship?

I’m a senior System administration working for the DoD cloud infrastructure and just got my Linux+ and DKA (docker) cert. my goal of 2024 is to land a full devops role and pass Terraform cert as well

“Developer complains that DevOps contains Ops”. All of these complaints are things that operations have been dealing with their entire career. I’m glad people are starting to understand just how exhausting/sucky operations can be. The context switch is particularly brutal. As well as having to constantly relearn everything every 2 years.

Refreshingly honest take! I always loved setting up the infrastructure for the team in my CS projects, and even today, I prefer writing tooling and DSLs for use by analysts than webdev slop. You've got me considering transitioning into DevOps

Just started a position as a DevOps engineer. My background is as an SDET engineer, so it was a somewhat unexpected change of pace with regards to the day to day operations. I think this was largely due to my underestimation of the role managing infrastructure plays in the position. I also was under the impression that building out the CI/CD pipelines on which the test run involved actually building said tests, as I was very familiar with in my role as an SDET.
While these assumptions weren't on the mark, I'm still really enjoying the position. I especially enjoy that learning on the job isn't something unique to new engineers, but a constant part of the position which engineers cut out time for at all levels of seniority. I love learning new things, but in other roles felt like it was the mark of a newer dev to spend a significant portion of time learning. I feel like taking the time to learn is expected in the role of a DevOps engineer, which is quite refreshing.

We build our own cloud for internal products. For me it’s puppet, salt, ansible, docker, python, ruby, bash, kvm, groovy, distro images, kickstart, packaging rpm. It’s just endless

"The best thing about learning something is learning it". Fucking devops people are dumb as fuck. Or is it just the fact it was a reddit post?
I'll stick with being full stack and being able to do their job as well as my own.

"The money is not worth it."
This describes all of crapitalism.

Bro what about the money???

That whole getting people pinging you for various stuff should be directed to a ticket system. I've been a Linux sysadmin for 20 years and that will crush you eventually trying to be the sme for everything because it makes you feel like some kind of god. You aren't. I kinda hate what things have become which is basically all the sysadmin work I did with as much extra as can be crammed in. It kinda depends on the company though how much of that actually ends up happening or not though.

Where i was working last, they basically expected you to be both. It was difficult and annoying. I thought it a bit excessive to be expected to be everything from a backend developer to a Cloud Formation expert.

DevOps is just a mistake.

This is the perspective of a Jr Engineer, and it shows. I'm assuming you worked as a DevOps Engineer at a startup company. If that's the case, sure, it's definitely a grind. But chances are most everyone else across the entire Engineering organization is also grinding. Because, you know, that's how startups survive.

Seems like you're actually into the managing Infrastructure piece. My advice would be to stay with it and eventually join a bigger company. Ideally one that doesn't put DevOps in the job title, and actually respects the fact that managing Infrastructure is its own separate discipline.

You'll come to find the work suddenly feels way more stable, there's no quicksand under your feet (constant learning about new tools and switching to them), your Manager will be more than reasonable about deadlines, and you'll write way more actual code/will have the time to contribute upstream to open source projects.

Great video. I am a softawre engineer looking to transition into DevOps. In software the code you wrote last week is already outdated and incompatible with the other library introduced.. I dont think constantly learning is something you don't do in software and I would say you do it as much or more. BTW, with the bad tech market, you have a much better shot at a stable career with DevOps/SRE work than SWE. SWE is quite saturated and the requirements for a software engineer are all over the map from being the architect, back/front end developer to the web designer.

"You may only have surface level knowledge of certain tools but still be considered a subject matter expert by other people in your company." I thought I was the only one, and it's been hard to deal with. Especially when management gets pushy.. I'm just hopeful I can find something else when they determine that I will never know it all. lol

Isn't DevOps good for people that enjoy being a SWE but is just average IQ

Thank you for putting it out, really not for me. If I'm forced to do such job (visa expiry, threat of starvation) I would, but not out of my free will. It's important to have honest opinions on jobs.

From non coding backgrounds what should learn first software developers or devops is fresher job available in Devop?

If it takes you 20 hours to terraform something that takes 20 minutes to create by hand then you suck at terraform. And you’ll probably sink way more than 20 hours into it in the long run. And you probably don’t use custom modules. So maybe your boss is right.

Is there any jobs will be available in future on DevOps technology?

It's not only devops, it's everywhere in tech, and even non-tech. For example, many bigger tech companies require passing few coding interviews, but the skill set tested by them is unrealistic: real development and devops require people skills, endurance skills (90% of tasks is boring bugfixing of bugs made by someone else, who probably doesn't even work here) and engineering skills (being able to understand limitations and select the best existing solution). However coding interview checks only coding skills, which constitute maybe 1% of what's it needed for a programmer (for a devops even less), leaving the rest of unchecked, and everyone frustrated: good coders because they got a wrong, boring job, experienced engineers because they have to learn not-used things before interviews (or get rejected) and then similarly - get a boring mostly bugfixing job, HR and mangement because they hire wrong and inefficient people. And it all comes down to the fact that most people in HR and management have no idea what the job of their employees is actually about!!!

same name as me, subscribed, also a devops engineer lmao

Funny that I started listening the video and was like "obviously, that's the Ops part of DevOps", I've been in the area more that 15 years (before it was even called DevOps) and what you describe is exactly my job now, and that's what I like, constant challenge, always learning something new (using docker since 0.3 for example, look this new shinny "bsd jail for linux" XD ), always in that "discomfort zone" where you have to figure out how this new tech works and pass it to the rest of the team. Can be challenging at times, but very rewarding at least for me, not everyone is made for that job.

If you are starting in this area let me tell you something: you will never know enough, but you have to keep the wagon moving forward.

Devops is not a coding job, lol. Why would you take not coding job, if you like coding? Devops is more like final form of tech support.

What I don't like in the industry is that it treats vendors as technologies and half of the field is AWS-engineering where you are a glorified AWS operartor for a lot of the time.

On the 'focus' subject, how do you manage other work that you have that is being managed in agile scrum sprints? My work, although not DevOps, is very similar in terms of demands on my time, dealing with incidents etc. and so i don't think sprints align naturally with it, much to the frustration of managers who want to apply it blindly to everything.

i disagree with "you constantly have to learn". you don't learn. you replace perfectly working method A with perfectly working method B because B is now trendier

No one thinks there is glitz and glamour in DevOps.

I am an infrastructure engineer and that is exactly my day to day. But I have a GREAT Manager.

This video blows my mind, I'm not sure why any of these topics are a surprise to people as a DevOps person. Being in charge of something, learning new things, being stretched. Why are any of these topics not great?

Unrealistic anything is part of IT - Period.

I've been in IT for 40+ years and the fact that someone posts a video on the fact there are 100's of better tools available now, no more physical H/W to deal with, Internet, etc. blows me away. Try fixing something that has no support or tools or visibility to it.

Was a junior devops briefly here recently (30yr career in Generic IT) returned back to IT due to company going under and at the end when i switched to another company to do more traditional IT managing i figured that i dislike the hyper-learning aspect of Devops. Why do i call it that when Generic IT 'reinvents the wheel every 7 years?' well precisely because of that: it reinvents the wheel even more faster and the older you get the slower you learn new things even if you accept the fact that you need to learn constantly. Couple this together with the fact that as a old 'senior' you WILL be considered senior all the time so you get the hardest tasks and projects and you dont have time to constantly learn new enough so there is a deficit in everything constantly. It is so in Generic IT as well but in Devops it can be ruinous if you catch my drift e.g. how can you be excited about new tech when you dont have in real-world terms the TIME to learn?. I have seen close up DevOps burn up and they do it the same way: Tickets and projects piling on e.g. 'real work' and then there is a need to develop new and learn new and then ISO standards come up and then there is communications difficulties, people not understanding and business leaders making decisions that make life hard and and.... burn. And IT side is the same but even there the pace is somewhat slower even though i have said goodbye permanently to so many colleagues during the years i need fingers from both hands to count them.

my previous job was devops, i hated it and lasted only 6 months.

Tell me honestly, will ai replace devops or improved?

I like to have the feeling that I understand how things works and communicate and DevOps is the perfect role to fulfill this. Plus, it is fairly easy transitioning from DevOps to a development role since you have the 'big picture' view that most developers does not have.

DevOps is an IT Support function - it's an important role, but no business - not even an IT company - is driven forward by its Infrastructure. Some companies are Engineering-centric, some are Marketing-centric, and some Product-centric.. but none are are Infra or DevOp-centric.

Most companies in my area is looking for software developers with devops experience.
In fact I am going on an intervju soon where they highlighted this.

I don´t think I would be happy only doing devops but for sure I like to be able to manage all aspects of delivering a product so devops is included in that.

You will need to learn the other aspects of software engineering when your project isn’t staffed properly.

22y/o aws devops engineer this video is so spot on.

Great video, and really helpful insights. How about a video about how and from where to learn the DevOps as a beginner ?

I've been DevOps Engineer about 5 years and can't land a job for 4 months already because mass layoff and a lot of developers switched to DevOps the market is overheated now.

DevOps is NOT engineering job. DevOps is yaml and json file editing job, and the amount of infrastructure and networking that you need to know is just very small and abstracted by cloud provider GUI, cli and REST interfaces. You are only learning what is specific to that cloud provider, you barely need to know what CCNA has to know, not to mention CCNP or CCIE. The same goes for system engineering and security, you are just scratching the surface of all that doing DevOps.

learning constantly new things for me is a requirement in tech industry. Everything can be change. I'm full-stack developer, I do some devops sometime, for me, it is difficult because it need you to practice all the time. Otherwise, we can forget most of things after a week not touching it.

great video!

You are a honest person, thanks. I guess the future is plumbing 😂

wtf is fun about devops looool

This video was really on point 😂 Thanks for making it!

i am learning devops from 3 years now and i dont even have time to brush my teeth and his teeths are so shiny i wonder how,
and a person giving me weekly money for almost no work i feel unrealastic life i dont know what is happening wtf i just wonder he will leave me ? because some tasks i do in weeks and i consume double time to do that without experience

Great video!