DevOps means you do IT/sysadmin, but you don’t do it for all the employees in the office. You do it for the developers. A regular IT guy deals with the Active Directory, the phone system, and the computers that all the office people use. A DevOps person manages the source code repos, the production and staging server infastructure, the CI and auto deployment systems, etc. They also deal with all the various cloud SaaS stuff that the developers are using.
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Yeah, that’s what the role is at my company, but I’ve seen some other roles listed as DevOps where it sounds like you’d be developing tooling to help engineers do their jobs.
Either way, not my cup of tea.
Yes, devops also has to develop tooling as well. Especially things like CI, auto deploy, containers, etc. all aren’t just ouf of the box solutions. They require someone to develop them who has a strong understanding of the systems architecture. That’s why not every IT person can be a DevOps person. It requires additional skills.
Of course, IT also requires skills that DevOps does not. Dealing with salespeople. Phone systems. Actual hardware. Interacting with technologically illiterate people.
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It all depends. In my case, my job entails a little bit of all of the above, though I’d say the majority is probably coding. However, given that my company is pretty small, even the the higher level folks like architects and managers also need to do some coding. My manager, for example, probably spends about half his time coding and half his time doing management stuff.
Even our CTO does some coding, though in his case it tends to be mostly “science experiments” and prototypes that, if they work, tend to be productized by those lower down the ladder: e.g., he reads a paper about some new algorithm or technology that could be beneficial, so he codes up some small test programs to play with it to see if it actually would be beneficial and how.
Of course, the situation may vary in larger companies. Given my experience, it seems like the bigger the company, the less likely you’ll be doing coding as part of your job the higher you move up the corporate ladder, with a few exceptions (I hear Google, for instance, makes all the engineering managers spend at least some of their time actively writing code for the products they are responsible for).
The kind of company may matter as well. I work for an actual tech company. That means the product we sell is the technology we develop. I’ve actually only worked for tech companies during my entire career, so that’s what I’m most familiar with. The situation may differ for companies where tech isn’t the product, but instead a means to sell their actual product, such as Amazon outside of AWS, insurance companies, news agencies, and so on.
To be honest, I just like solving problems on the job, and a lot of the problems I look at require coding.
I expect devops to also build tools and write code.
They’re not writing product code. They’re writing code for tools and services used by developers, infrastructure teams, and others internally.
When I did devops before it was called devops, I did all of these things:
- Monitor and troubleshoot our products’ systems
- Build tools to better monitor and troubleshoot said systems
- Deploy and manage vendor tools to monitor and troubleshoot said systems
- Administer internal support systems
- Perform UAT on new product releases (separate from QA)
- Respond to serious incidents
- Troubleshoot routers/switchers/OSs/servers
Ops skills without coding, networking, and sysadmin skills were useless. We needed people who could do all of these things.
I wouldn’t configure the routers or perform routine maintenance on them. I also wouldn’t design or deploy networks (we had a separate network team). But I knew how to:
- Log into them to make emergency changes
- Log into them to troubleshoot (look at/clear counters, check status of interfaces, etc…)
- Query them via SNMP
- Monitor them via SNMP
- Run packet captures on their various interfaces
I also knew a lot about low level networking (Layers 0-4) so as to interpret any findings.
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Devops seems really supply-constrained right now. Most of my team (we architect New York Magazine’s CMS and build a lot of the internal tooling) has had to learn a bit of ops (CI, containers, etc) just to fill out the missing knowledge that our legacy *nix sysadmins haven’t really kept up to date on. We’re actually hiring someone specifically with the kind of full-spectrum aws skillset that we’re lacking.
Personally I’m finding it hard to find senior-enough web devs. The pool of applicants is very large, but it’s definitely saturated by coders who don’t really have a handle on the collaborative / mentoring / architecture aspects I kinda expect from “seniority.” If you know anyone, especially from underrepresented backgrounds, tell them to come work with me.
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Really any job title with “engineer” (other than “software engineer” but honestly I don’t love that one either) that’s 100% non-embedded software is a bullshit title, invented solely to ruin my search strings.
I have all these skills you want, but I just changed jobs for the first time in 8-9 years, so I’m unlikely to change soon. The problem is that this new job is too luxurious. I can work from home pretty much whenever I want. Every time I think I’m working from home too much, all the other people on my team are doing it way more than I am. I’m probably in the office the most! It took a long time to find a job more lax than my previous one, is there someone out there who can lure me away with a ridiculous amount of vacation, big time moneys, and only working 4 days a week?
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Fun fact: Most of our devs are either “Web Developer” or “Senior Web Developer,” but when we had to go through the visa process for a Canadian employee we were told to give them the title of “Software Engineer.”
@Scott I think the main problem with finding really good devops/developers in NYC is that half of them go to finance (for the dollars) and the rest of them have already found their perfect startup / cushy position / nonprofit that does good in the world / etc.
In my college town in the middle of nowhere we actually have a couple companies from the coasts that set up offices to basically remote hire people cheaper. I don’t work for them, but the decent intern we had ended up working there. He gets paid probably 150% of what he would get paid by a local company and gets to mostly work remote.
Even with the ball clearly in the developer’s court, companies still act like they are doing you a favor by hiring you. As if you have to convince them to hire you. Nononono. You have to convince me to even want to work for you in the first place.
Every recruiter went on and on about challenging work, solving cool problems, working with (insert tech here). Get that shit out of my face. If you call, the first words out of your mouth should be “How would you like 40 vacation days?” Make people offers they can’t refuse, and you’ll be fully staffed in a week.
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There’s a company in my town run by dudes who basically started as internet ticket scalpers, then went into sort of predatory less regulated home loans somehow. They have a ton of revenue, so they started hiring a ton of developers. And most people that start working there talk about how great it is shooting nerf guns at each other or playing hacky sack or some other bullshit. But all those “benefits” are just there to entice people that are not paying attention. Leadership seems fucked there, people are constantly fighting each other for work and status. There’s a lot of dogma that seems to be instilled in people to try to make them afraid for their jobs. Lots of hire and fire to keep the fear in employees. They dread people like you that realize you could just go work somewhere else.
When your town is not a major city, you often can’t go work somewhere else.
This is why the New York labor market is so alluring to companies, but also so competitive.
Companies can have a giant pool of talent for even obscure skills. Need a C++ developer with video compositing experience? An animator who can code and has public speaking skills? A technical writer who’s also an expert in tennis and sportscasting? There are probably 10 of each you can interview today. If you need the best, and you’re willing to pay, you’re golden.
If you’re in a smaller city, you’re stuck with the pool of people who already live there or could be convinced to move there. Full-time remote work is pretty rare in most fields.
From the labor side, if you live in that small city, you either need to have very generic skills or be good enough to be indispensable to one of the (few) employers there. The employers, however, know that there probably aren’t other options for you.
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That does seem to be their typical fodder. People who fear change or have families or other responsibilities that tie them down. More broadly, fear in general. A fair number of concealed carry people that really shouldn’t be, etc.
The emergence of this thread is fortuitous, since it seems I might need to look into changing jobs soon.
I’ve been a Web Publisher in the Boston area for the past 8ish years, mostly doing front-end work with HTML and CSS, with some minor JS, while working in the SDL Tridion CMS. Lately my job has been more about working with the marketing team for content management than the actual technical aspects of coding, and I’m totally fine with that.
I’m just not sure how to quantify that when job searching. It seems like everyone wants a Web Developer with all kinds of additional development and coding skills that I haven’t needed since college. But I know that the kinds of jobs that I’m looking for exist, since I’ve had two of them. Just looking at job sites and seeing buzz-phrases like “delivering robust web-based solutions” is giving me anxiety, and I don’t even need to really start looking for a few months.
My company is looking for a QA person now and possibly a programmer soon, although the job is in DE.
My company Persado is hiring, mostly in SF and NY. Contrary to most startups we have decent work/life balance. PM me if you see something you’re interested in and want to chat about it:
I thought you worked in publishing, now you are working for evil marketing?
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My company is hiring. I’m self employed. I guess I’m paying me to do the job. Or not paying. Shit.
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