A recurring argument in the DevOps community is whether the word DevOps should exist within a job title. Most people close to DevOps think it’s a potentially harmful anti-pattern which indicates a misunderstanding of what DevOps is all about. A few years ago I agreed with this, but I’ve now changed my mind.
Yes, DevOps is a culture, a mindset and all of those good things. It is about how people work together much more than automation. I also appreciate the argument that labelling individuals and teams with DevOps potentially introduces a silo where we are trying to solve a problem of siloes.
With all of that recognised, I’m still more than happy to now call myself a DevOps Engineer.
There were lots of job titles that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Agile Coaches, Social Media Managers, Data Scientists and Mobile App Developers for instance. Those fields evolved and there are now recognised experts in those fields who know how to apply the tools and help organisations be successful with them.
DevOps is the same. It is maturing as a movement and there is now enough specialist knowledge in the niche that people can build significant niche expertise, work within it full time, and even build long term careers as DevOps Engineers.
Definition Of A DevOps Engineer
DevOps Engineers are the people who sit between or within Development and Operations and use automation across the SDLC to reduce the cycle time from development to production.
These Engineers will bring knowledge across Development, Testing and Operations and help with gluing those areas together to ease the transition of code across them.
They will have deep technical skills in tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Vagrant and Docker, and use these tools to help their organisations deliver better software, faster and more reliably. They will also likely understand cloud and how to use infrastructure automation to leverage this to best effect.
As important as the technical knowledge is what we call the ‘DevOps Mindset’ – a personality type and approach that can help the IT organisation move from traditional ways of working, break down siloes, and collaborate more effectively. Technical skills alone do not make an effective DevOps Engineer.
Why This Matters
To me, this all sounds meaty enough to be a full time role and a career path. Therefore, why shouldn’t it also have it’s own name to identify it by?
I’ve always been pragmatic about this, but my main interest in this is how accepting DevOps Engineers as a job title might help to overcome the DevOps skills crisis – the huge shortage of people in industry who have this skill set and the fact that as an industry, we have still have no sustainable path to creating these people.
By accepting DevOps Engineers as a job and a career path, I think the definition of one would become more concrete. There would be more of a shared understanding over what it means, rather than savvy build and release engineers or system administrators re-badging themselves.
More people could align themselves to DevOps Engineering and work towards obtaining this recognised skill set.
Visibility of DevOps activities within the business would grow, and budgets would be created to support DevOps rather than it being an under the radar activity happening under other functional siloes.
Training for DevOps Engineers might emerge, and one day, it might even end up as a University Level course.
All of these things would help DevOps expand as a movement and practice in industry, which is ultimately a good thing for the sponsoring organisations and anyone who works in IT. Here at Contino, the more we interact with customers around DevOps, the more I realize this is the path things should take.
This is a fantastic post! I am a Full Stack & DevOps engineer myself. I love this post!
I am only a SysOp but I also love this post 🙂
Here is a quick presentation I’ve done at DevopsDays Paris about a role “Spock” for devops.
http://guilhem.github.io/presentations/2015/04/15/devops-spock.html
Can be really good to explain what you are doing 😉
I can’t be the only one who is contact for “super-ops” job because I have “devops” on my CV.
As someone who was recently downsized I’ve been struggling with exactly this. At my past job I was hired when the entire IT department was 3 people. Everyone was “full-stack” (had to look that up when I started to search for jobs). Everyone practiced “DevOps”. Heck we were so agile we developed directly on the production server (I’m not proud of this). Aka We were {full-stack,devops,agile} before {full-stack,devops,agile} were words (actually I’m sure agile existed in 2006 but you get the idea)
First interview I had was setup by a coworker and was able for me to get my foot in the door within days of being let go. I went in to the interview thinking they wanted a full-stack developer. As I progressed through the interview I became aware that they were looking for someone to join their “DevOps Team”. As they explained what the role would involve it was clear that THIS is what I do and what I want to do. Also left with the impression that although they did refer to themselves as the “DevOps Team” it was a small company and open so I didn’t read in to that as another silo.
Sadly I didn’t get the job but the knowledge I gained from that has helped me immensely. I’m still struggling with updating things. My “summary” on linkedin fills up the page because I know a lot of things and I want to make it clear I do but also not result in information overload. My resume is pretty much entirely dedicated to what I did at that job because I was there for 10 years, hired as a developer then became a dedicated sysadmin as the company grew. I introduced things like puppet not because it was the cool thing but because I program something that configured a system for me. But I don’t want to turn this into a self-promotion post…
Last few positions I’ve applied for were “DevOps Engineer”. Usually I get calls (granted these are postings by placement companies) because of the matching skillset I have. I’ve applied to “Systems Engineer” and have yet to get a call back on one of those. Perhaps this is telling that by posting a job with DevOps in the title that company is more open to that mindset while a company that’s looking for a systems engineer which contains very similar requirements may be more rooted in developer/operations silos.
So the short version. I’m confused. I want a job doing DevOpsy (yes I just made that up) things but I also don’t want to be part of a DevOps silo. I think that’ll be avoided mainly because I like smaller companies so by the very nature of that it’s too small to really become silos, unless they’re silos that consist of one person. I do still proudly put DevOps as a skill though (once I widdle down my summary to something more summary-like)
As with Agile, the culture shift which will make the most difference is the really hard bit. Saying you’re happy for yourself to be called DevOps Engineer (particularly if you are someone with a platform and position of influence) is not helping with the wider issue of the lazy appropriation of the term, which allows organisations to pretend they are doing DevOps without actually changing anything – all the silos are allowed stay in place.
This is what I see far more often than not:
– DevOps Teams are very rarely cross-functional teams, just a rebadging of the IT Operations/SysAdmin Team.
– SysAdmins are now regularly referred to as DevOps (“we need a DevOps to help us get this server configured, are any around?”) without there being any change in their role or the way they work.
– DevOps as a role in the industry right now generally (there are of course exceptions) refers to people starting to use automation tools like Ansible/Puppet rather than bash scripts, but largely still working in isolation from Development (“JustOps”?).
I’m just sad to see the same issues coming out in the relatively early days of the DevOps movement as we saw with Agile.
As they said in BattleStar Galactica, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”.