https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/junior-devops-engineer-jobs/?c...
No programming experience required (only some minor scripting in shell languages & a reference to education), in fact this job ad reads identically to a sysadmin job from 2014; in the middle of the "sysadmins can't code" zeitgeist, when all developing sysadmins had moved to become devops engineers or whatever.
Copied from the ad:
----8<---- Your tasks:
* Containerization and orchestration of our products for development, testing and production environments designed for cloud and on-premise solutions
* Produce reference architectures and standardize solutions to streamline efficiencies within the business
* Mitigate against Cybersecurity threats by ensuring systems are safe, secure and compliant to best practice recommendations (e.g. CIS Benchmarks, Vulnerability scans and Penetration tests)
Your profile:
* Finished studies in Computer Science or software engineering (Bachelor, Master)
* Proficient understanding of virtualization, containerization and orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Podman)
* Experience working with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins
* Experience of Infrastructure as Code tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Helm
* Scripting knowledge including bash, PowerShell
* English fluently, German is an advantage;
* Improvement-driven, structured and proactive team player, high sense for quality, open minded
* Working in an agile environment (Scrum, Safe)
---->8----
Proficient understanding of virtualization, containerization and orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes, Podman) Experience working with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins
The point is coding skills are not required to do the job. Sure it would be nice but if somebody ticks all the other boxes then being good at programming isn't important.
Sure, maybe some of the work isn't writing software. But some of it is, and it shouldn't be written by amateurs. Also, they are building these things for people who do write software. It would be hard to produce something that works for them without understanding what they do.
Reading code, understanding building and deployment are all useful and required to some extent (especially the latter). But specific programming skills are not required any more than that would be for say a technical writer or network engineer.
What I'm trying to drive home here is that you do need programming experience to be a good sysadmin/devops/platform; back when devops as a job title was becoming "a thing"(tm) I was told over and over again that sysadmins couldn't code and thus we need devops.
Now it seems devops don't need to be able to code (which you seem to think as well). So we will come up with a new term to cover programmers who understand systems.
Those "degree" sections are universally optional, they're always listed by I have never seen them honoured.
I'd put $20,000 down on the wager that I could get that job with only a Cisco certification (or even nothing at all).
But the criticism was that the job ad was not requiring knowledge of how to write code, and I was pointing out that the degree requirement (strict or not) indicates that that's not true.
If you don't have the required degree but can demonstrate equivalent skills, then that's fine. Kudos to the company about being flexible on the formalities side.
There is a line that is universally ignored in job ads. This is that line.
if I showed no ability to write a for loop or a linkedlist. I could still get that job.
I see it time and time again, it's like we must add that line to job descriptions, but it's never checked, never verified and ultimately it serves no purpose. There will be no difference between someone with a BSc in CompSci, an MSc in CompSci or no degree at all.
The thing that will get you that job, likely, is discussing how http works, how tcp works and perhaps something to do with exit codes.
Might not be true for this particular posting.
The only european country that takes titles even more serious is Austria. So without a M.Sc. in CS or a similar M.Sc. your chances may be quite low to even get an interview. Especially since university is basically free here so many people have a B.Sc. or M.Sc. in germany.
No BSc or MSc here.
I’m sure this is the case in some places. This can’t be farther from the truth in many others. At every organization I’ve been a part of, the best “DevOps” on the team was usually the person who was the best at coding, or at least understood it the best - and coding is one of those things that you can’t really understand well if you don’t do a lot of it.
But plenty of developers only have a vague picture of what production looks like especially in a complex environment. However they are perfectly able to do their job okay and produce working code.
That typically entails programming experience, especially in Germany.
Most companies do. Perhaps not top Silicon Valley tech companies with cutting edge needs and paying over $150k, but overall I've found that dev ops teams have plenty of jobs for 'green' team members. You just have to accept a 'green' salary and 'green' job responsibilities.
Yes. Devops people come from a SWE background generally + they understand infra. They usually have 10+ years experience. Most specialties work this way in software: security, devops, AI, ML, ... etc. You need to be a SWE first, then specialize.
Also I work in AI/ML and hardly anybody has 10+ years of SWE experience before specialising. Most people start fresh out of a PhD or postdoc program or come from some sort of math or physics background.
Now it's actually 80:20 due to software engineers becoming frustrated and disillusioned with the current state of things. Not only due to specialization and the push towards tool standardization (you don't get to build many custom components because we k8s all the things so most of the time you're just writing yaml/hcl), but because working with regular sysadmins gets extremely frustrating.
This could be the entire problem. These are specialized fields. They are being treated like they are not.