In this post I want to talk about my perspective on hiring a DevOps Engineer, why I believe it looks quite bad for a business to advertise for a position in that role, and if I identify as DevOps Engineer.

I was recently reading a thread on LinkedIn about a rant on a job offer posted by a recruiter. A question that I believed genuine and that stroke me the most was:

What is DevOps, then?

Ranting on recruiters and the hiring process is a common attitude that I can’t see going away any time soon; however, I may write a separate post with my point of view, and I bet it is going to be an uncommon one.

Reading that question, and the entire thread, triggered me and made me want to spell it out myself: I wanted to do that for so long. Luckily, my new habit decided to kick in: I paused. Feels awkward all the times, but that lead me to ask myself: is it really possible that nobody has already written something accurate about DevOps? Of course, they did.

What is DevOps, then?

Do you know who has a surprisingly outstanding page about DevOps? AWS. My surprise is most certainly rooted in my biases toward Amazon as a business, but the page is spot on, from the very first line:

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools

The choice of words and the order in which they have been used is perfect. First and foremost, DevOps started as a cultural philosophy. The concept of DevOps emerged out of a discussion between Andrew Clay and Patrick Debois in 2008: they wanted to change the way people worked in the IT environment. They needed a shift in the mindset, first. If you want to read more about the story of DevOps, devops.com has an accurate timeline. What came next was a comprehensive set of best practices 1 to go along with this new way of working. Last but not least, the will to adopt those new practices created the need for new tools.

Identifying DevOps as the set of tools to automate the IT infrastructure is, I believe, one of the reasons why most business are only scratching the surface of its potentials.

What is a DevOps Engineer, then?

Any engineer that follows the DevOps cultural philosophy and best practices. Is it an IT role? Not really: it only says how you would work, not what would you do. Does it bother me to read DevOps engineer as a role in any job offer? It used to, now I regard it as an indicator of the quality of the business: it clearly shows that they didn’t get it and this comes with all sorts of implications. What about the DevOps guy in my team? The very sentence the DevOps guy in my team is what the DevOps culture wants to move away from: competence siloing. That sentence is micro-scale competence siloing, with some sugar coating. That sentence is an indication of how much your organization is falling short on improving the IT working environment and its performance; it is highly likely that your organization has just jumped on board of the DevOps bandwagon without actually knowing what it is.

Am I a DevOps Engineer?

I really don’t like to put any label on anybody, but I’m so fond of the culture and principles of DevOps, that they are now part of me.

Yes, Yes I am.

  1. Here I would move a critique to the page: Communication and Collaboration should have been listed as the first of the best practices, as it is the only one you can’t succeed without. However, I can’t really blame them: their core business is to sell, and they can’t sell Communication and Collaboration. ↩