How to skip the line and become a Senior DevOps Engineer?
If you are not sure yet what a DevOps engineer does, please read it here:
This article is a tricky one, and if you read it in a hurry, you might need to get it right.
Take your time, and read the context. I mean it. You should know what a DevOps Engineer is supposed to do. As well as an SRE, and what DevOps is before you read this one.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
These last years all we see is the evolution of “DevOps”. There is a good reason for that. With DevOps, we are now able to save a lot of money. Well… companies run after money (and so do we).
Suddenly, every manager is eager to have DevOps engineers specialists on their teams, since we are capable of creating routines to save a lot of money of course.
The thing is, how can we have more than 10 years of experience being DevOps Engineers if this role didn’t exist a decade ago?
Here is where you should understand precisely what DevOps Engineer does and how you can start calling yourself a DevOps Engineer from a long time ago.
The market is calling DevOps engineers the people who understand DevOps principles and are capable of doing Site Reliability Engineering tasks.
The problem here
We are looking at the Data Engineer 2.0 problem, and what do I mean by that? Companies are trying to hire ninjas with code capabilities. If you don’t know this story tail yet, have a look here:
Take your time and understand what is going on with the Data Engineering role. I think you can spot some similarities with DevOps Engineering…
How so? The confusion. You can be a Senior DevOps Engineer without ever touching a Kubernetes cluster. Do you need to know programming? Of course! But in what language? Does it make any difference? Do you need to learn front-end? Some tech recruiters seem to think so.
So, how to become a Senior?
Get hired for a Senior vacancy and perform. Simple as that.
Perhaps not the answer you were expecting. And yes, I can elaborate on this. But it comes to that, please have that in mind.
Every vacancy has its own needs.
Let’s say you work In company X and you are junior, and you work with Terraform. Then, you get great skills in company X in Terraform.
Then you try out a Senior Vacancy for Terraform automation in company Y, and they have some other things they care about (such as Docker, and Kubernetes) but you nailed the Terraform challenge. Voi lá. You got it.
Now you are a Senior DevOps Engineer. Do you deserve it? Have someone done it before? Come on… Jr… Mid… Sr… Just names. A lot of companies don’t even care nowadays if you have a bachelor.
So you might be wondering
How to become really good? How to get into interviews? How to nail the interviews?
Take practice seriously: Contribute to Open-Source. Create Personal Projects and lift them up, show the World what you are capable of. Understand concepts, get confidence, and eventually you’ll get there.
See how I did it:
I was careful enough to create a course in English just to show my international recruiters I could speak the language even though I’m Brazilian.
I even created I platform using a bought DNS which I run on Kubernetes, created a website, put it on Docker, and deployed it on AKS (Azure), which is available here:
