DevOps is all about helping bring new software and applications to the market faster while ensuring the best value for the end-user. The collective success of implementing this model rests heavily on the people who are tasked with implementing it.
Now, hiring good people, in general, is hard; hiring good developers is harder; hiring good DevOps experts is the hardest. Why? For one, hiring for DevOps is more than filling one narrow role – to take on such a complex task for an organization requires great people. Read further to explore the complex role of a DevOps expert and several reasons why enterprises struggle to find the right people to satisfy their DevOps needs.
What is DevOps?
More than a specific job title or department within an organization, DevOps is a culture. As the name implies, it’s at the intersection of development and operations. DevOps is about continuous innovation and improvement and deals with the entire lifecycle of the technologies and services, as well as everything that goes into their delivery and functioning. It’s all about improving speed of delivery while ensuring the highest quality user experience.
When it comes to implementing a DevOps culture, a DevOps engineer plays a central role. They’re responsible for setting up, adjusting, and maintaining Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines. They’ll also be responsible for application and infrastructure planning, testing and development, automation implementation, security, and ongoing monitoring. Therefore, a great DevOps expert will need to be a multi-talented IT professional with the right combination of skills in both development and operations.
Hiring for DevOps
One of the leading reasons it’s so challenging to hire for DevOps is because it’s not taught in schools. DevOps experts gain most of their expertise through a combination of self-learning and in-the-field experience. One needs to gain direct experience to learn the necessary skills, and yet it’s tough to gain experience as it requires a company to take a chance on a junior who then has the opportunity to interact with their systems.
As briefly mentioned earlier, another reason this hiring process is so tricky is because of the complex number of skills a DevOps expert must have. Here’s a more in-depth breakdown of some of these skills:
Technical skills
An excellent DevOps hire needs to be versatile with a wealth of knowledge across multiple levels of the tech stack. They’ll need to understand complex networks to be able to implement efficient solutions. Knowledge of cloud technologies and hardware is essential to a DevOps engineer’s skills. They will also need to have a command of automation technologies and tools, including continuous integration, development, and testing, monitoring, infrastructure settings, and configuration management. Understanding containerization, infrastructure as code, versioning and deployment, databases, and web proxying are also essential skills.
Soft skills
DevOps isn’t solely about tools and technologies – it’s about how departments and team members work together. Thus, finding someone with the relevant soft skills is essential – and another challenging aspect of hiring for DevOps.
The ideal candidate needs impressive interpersonal skills to interact and collaborate with their team, leveraging their strengths and those of their team members. Moreover, this must be done with a focus on bringing value to the organization and the customer.
These experts are front and centre problem solvers, collaborators, and communicators, which requires confidence, initiative, and innovative thinking. But how can a company evaluate these skills? It’s a difficult task that may require taking a chance on an applicant first to observe them in action with their peers. Often, this is how top talent emerges – they were allowed to prove themselves.
The Vetting Process
It’s indubitable that finding someone with such a multifaceted background is challenging. What makes it more complex is that every enterprise has a different perspective on what DevOps is, and as their organizational culture differs, it makes it hard to find someone with the same outlook. Therefore, when hiring for DevOps, you must be strategic, critically thinking about how the DevOps engineer fits into your organization.
DevOps has become one of the most popular and highest paying jobs; a quick search on LinkedIn using the keyword “devops” reveals more than 1.2 million results, with 642,000 professionals claiming to be DevOps engineers. So – how does one single out genuine expertise? This is another tricky aspect of the hiring process: properly being able to vet all potential candidates. It’ll involve plenty of time and resources to carry out a stringent interview process involving direct questions, tests, and trial runs. References are another vital aspect of the hiring process, but again, sometimes difficult to attain.
Hiring for DevOps will be a time-consuming exercise that many enterprises will struggle with. It’s unlikely, and sometimes near impossible, for this to be a job that just one person can do. Therefore, a company hiring for DevOps would likely require a diverse team of experts who bring their unique skills to the table to work cohesively to implement the DevOps culture. In line with this, enterprises may need to consider alternate options – outsourcing their DevOps being one of them.
Final Thoughts
For many organizations, hiring individuals to take on DevOps needs will be challenging. An alternative option is to hire a team of professionals with extensive experience and a track record for completing projects. At stack.io, we love discovering and using the best technologies. We believe in a culture of continuous improvement, and our dedicated team of operations experts can help you modernize your setup while you focus on solving problems for your clients.