What skills and personality do you need for a career in DevOps?
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To succeed in a DevOps career, one needs a desire to learn, strong communication skills, and a collaborative mindset. Technical knowledge in areas such as coding and operations is essential, but the ability to work well in a team and understand the bigger picture is equally critical. Successful DevOps professionals are characterized by their openness, curiosity, and adaptability to new technologies.
What skills and personality do you need for a career in DevOps?
- 1. What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? DevOps and YouAdvice for Building Your Career
- 2. 1. A desire to learn and improve things 2. Communication and collaboration 3. Tech chops and tools: ops need to dev 4. Caring about the big picture
- 3. “First and foremost, I think a desire to make things better through automation and a hunger for fixing issues.” Travis Fields @tefields Senior DevOps Engineer Nike United States 3
- 4. “Success in DevOps boils down to flexibility and eagerness to learn. There is definitely a base skill set required, but you don’t need to be an expert developer or operations engineer; you need to be able and eager to learn technologies that are new to you or new to the industry.” “More than complete mastery in any one particular subject, you need the willingness to learn a broad array of tools, techniques, architectures, and communication styles.” Erin Fahy Senior DevOps Engineer Stanford University United States Kyle Olsen DevOps Engineer Datapipe United States What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? 4
- 5. “A desire to understand the pieces is a prerequisite to understanding the pieces. If you don’t care to figure out the deep whys of why something broke or went well, it’ll be very hard to do advanced automation work.” Amy Marco @Big__Amy Director of Technology Argent United States What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? 5
- 6. “Our team looks for out-of-the-box thinkers, people who are curious and not afraid to ask questions. Experience is important, but having the right soft skills is just as important. Whenever we hire, we always look to understand a potential candidate’s ability to break down complex problems into small, manageable building blocks.” Jason Man @mrjasonman DevOps Continuous Delivery Consultant Forest Technologies United Kingdom What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? 6
- 7. 1. A desire to learn and improve things 2. Communication and collaboration 3. Tech chops and tools: ops need to dev 4. Caring about the big picture
- 8. “The core parts of working effectively in DevOps are openness, communication, empathy, and lack of ego — the ability to work well with others, see things from their point of view, and learn together with them how to make the organisation succeed. Experience in teams with these kinds of characteristics is always helpful.” “We look for candidates who exemplify our company values (Craft, Curiosity, Efficacy, Empathy); who are passionate about contributing to an inclusive and welcoming environment; who are collaborative; and who participate in the open source community and care about sharing their work.” Sam Eaton @thesamoth VP of Engineering for Operations and Infrastructure, Yelp United States Cate Connelly Senior Recruiter Simple United States What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? 8
- 9. “Teamwork is the number-one skill a DevOps person needs to be successful. Yes, there are the technical skills that keep the DevOps phenomenon growing — coding, continuous integration and deployment, server management, etc. — but even as those tools we use change, the team stays the same. When dev and ops roles realize that the goal for both is to produce a high- quality product, that’s when everyone becomes successful at DevOps.” Michael Jenkins @managedkaos Linux Engineer United Business Media United States 9
- 10. “DevOps engineers need to have technical acumen, but I think it’s even more important that they know how to work well on a team … The automation and velocity of DevOps amplifies any flaws and misunderstandings in a project, so getting the requirements and relationships right is a key attribute for a successful DevOps engineer.” Dwayne Melancon @ThatDwayne CTO VP of Research and Development Tripwire United States 10
- 11. “You can have all the automation of the world, implement Agile methodologies by the book, but if there isn’t a communication channel between your teams, then your flow is broken.” Javier D’Ovidio @jdovidio VP of Operations Edrans Argentina 11What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps?
- 12. 1. A desire to learn and improve things 2. Communication and collaboration 3. Tech chops and tools: ops need to dev 4. Caring about the big picture
- 13. “It’s become pretty clear that operations people now need to have their feet more in the development side of things. You used to be able to get by as a sysadmin by doing a little shell scripting or knowing a little Perl. That’s still the case in some shops, but if you want to work somewhere really interesting you need to be able to write some code.” Rich Burroughs @richburroughs Operations Engineer Yesmail United States 13What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps?
- 14. “The skills I was looking for in my roles were Linux OS, Puppet or Ansible, Bash Shell or Python for scripting, continuous integration and/or continuous delivery, Git source control and Jenkins.” “We look for some coding familiarity and scripting experience. It’s also helpful to have hands-on knowledge of Docker, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, GitHub, and a lot of other tools commonly used in DevOps.” Dwayne Melancon @ThatDwayne CTO VP of Research and Development Tripwire United States Steve Dazzo Recruiter PayPal United States What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? 14
- 15. “Without understanding how the operating system works you won’t be able to do most of the operations work. You should be familiar with the command line and all of the functionality that is available there. Without the ability to do some programming, whether that’s shell scripting, Puppet, Ruby, Python, etc., you will be stuck doing things the manual, hard way and you won’t be able to scale.” Klynton Jessop @ klyntonj DevOps Engineer HelloSign United States 15What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps?
- 16. 1. A desire to learn and improve things 2. Communication and collaboration 3. Tech chops and tools: ops need to dev 4. Caring about the big picture
- 17. “Really it just comes down to giving a crap about things that happen outside your text editor, understanding that there’s a business and a human context to everything we do, and that those are more important than any technical implementation.” Jon Topper @jtopper Principal Consultant and CTO The Scale Factory United Kingdom What skills and personality attributes do you need to succeed in a career in DevOps? 17
- 18. “I believe the primary characteristics to look for are strong commitment to end-user outcomes and customer service capability; strength in collaboration to thrash out the best solutions and readily take on constructive criticism; a comfort with rapid change, with willingness to accept and adhere to diligence checks; all underpinned with a strong technical background to provide robust, considered design and development work.” Jon Faulkner CIO London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine United Kingdom 18
- 19. Now ... Go get the DevOps! For much more advice on how to start and grow your career in DevOps, read the full ebook DevOps and You: Advice for Building Your Career at puppet.com/devops-and-you.